Second Opinion

by Claire Rayner

And neither of the voices was that of a child.

  She shot out of the cubicle she was in and over to the wash basin and began to run the water. The mirror in front of her reflected all that was going on behind her and she watched covertly but closely from beneath her lashes as she washed. It didn’t seem possible that the person for whom she’d been waiting and watching had somehow eluded her, come on a different flight, walked past her, only to be here now, and yet she was convinced that was what had happened. Those two voices had been too expressive, too tight, too low and too conspiratorial for her to doubt it.

  Other women around her washed and dried their hands under the hot-air dryers and prinked with lipstick and powder puffs as she stood there, and still one of the cubicle doors remained closed. The conviction grew in her that there was a deep significance here — yet at the same time she was very aware of the clock creeping on and the need to get back to the crowded barrier in time to watch the arrival of the passengers from Bucharest if she was wrong about what was happening here.

  She had washed enough to perform an operation, had dried her hands till they were red with the heat, had primped and tweaked at her hair until she felt like a photographer’s model or something before the cubicle door at last opened.

  It did not open far; someone slipped out, and George stared through the mirror, fascinated. The person who emerged was a short round girl, quite young but far from youthfully dressed. Her hair was tied up in a scarf and her feet were in heavy boots. George had to crane to see them but the girl stood still for a moment at the door of the lavatory which had now closed again, ostensibly fastening her jacket, a thick one, quilted and lumpy. She had her head down so that her face could not be seen but George had the impression not of roundness like her body but of angularity. The legs in the heavy trousers beneath the thick jacket couldn’t be seen; the trousers were ill cut and baggy and showed no sign of the flesh beneath them.

  The girl moved away then and headed slowly for the door, and George stood poised, uncertain what to do next. She was as sure as she could be that she was looking at the courier; the clothes, the style, everything about her was as she had imagined the courier would be. The fact that she had clearly not come off the Bucharest flight was beside the point; there had to be other ways of getting into London from Romania than the obvious one, surely?

  But if I go after her, then whoever she has left behind in that cubicle will get away, she thought, feverishly pulling at her hair without realizing she was doing it, still trying to pretend she was preening and not watching the woman who had now finished buttoning her coat.

  The woman lifted her chin and George managed some how to shift her eyeline so that she was not obviously staring at her, but then couldn’t help it. George’s eyes flicked back till she was looking at her, and her pulse began to pump thickly in her ears. The girl was staring at her, scared and wide eyed, and her face was exactly as George had suspected it would be; thin, bony and far from well covered. There was no way that a girl with a face like that was as bulky as her clothes would make a casual looker suspect. Without stopping to think further George whirled and began to move towards her.

  It all happened very quickly then. As the girl saw George coming she moved sideways, quite clearly intending to run, but as she did so a woman with four small children in tow came fussing into the lavatory from outside, talking loudly at one of the children who was dragging on her hand and bawling at the top of her voice. The girl in the bulky clothes had to dodge to avoid them, and as she did so, the door of the cubicle she had come from opened again and a woman came out. She was wearing a sensible navy blue coat and a round hat pushed down on to her head so firmly no hair could be seen. Her face was pale and she wore no make-up. She looked vaguely uniformed, and the impression was increased by the sensible bag she had depending from a shoulder strap on her right side and the big oblong carrier bag she was holding in her left hand. George looked at the girl, then at the hatted woman and decided. She made a lunge for the latter, and in that moment the girl in the quilted jacket made her escape, pushing past the woman with the collection of four children, all of whom immediately started wailing loudly as the escaper knocked against them.

  But it had been enough for George. She had the woman in the hat and the almost-uniform by the arm and was pulling on it, holding on for grim death.

  ‘Sister!’ she said loudly. ‘Sister Collinson! Not the person I expected to see at all! May I look in your bag, please?’

  37

  ‘I don’t think,’ Gus said, ‘I’ve ever seen anything funnier.’

  ‘If it had been you, you’d be laughing out of the other end of your anatomy,’ George said, wincing as she moved her right arm. It still ached abominably where the older of the four children had bitten her. She hadn’t broken the skin but had made a massive bruise. ‘That child had jaws like a Rottweiler.’

  ‘Yeah, pity about that. Still, if it hadn’t been for them …’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for me your lot would have lost her this time altogether,’ George said. ‘Never mind those godawful kids.’

  ‘We’d have got her eventually,’ Gus said. ‘They’ve got three more of her couriers since then.’ He smiled then, a little grimly. ‘They were very surprised young women when it was one of my PCs they met in the loo.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ George said. ‘Maybe. The thing is, I —’

  He leaned forward and touched her bruised arm gently. ‘It’s all right, George. I know it was you who broke this case. So will everyone else. That’s a promise.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘You make me sound —’ She stopped.

  ‘Competitive? You bet your sweet whatever-it-is.’ He laughed. ‘But that’s the way I am, too. If I’d had the good luck to be in the right place at the right moment the way you were, I’d be pretty damned pleased with myself too.’

  ‘It wasn’t just luck,’ she said. ‘I mean, I had thought about it.’

  ‘Who are you kidding, sweetheart? You was waiting for the Bucharest flight, the same as we were. Rupert told me you were there as soon as I turned up, and I saw you for myself! But I thought, who am I to spoil her fun? But then you vanished.’

  ‘I was bursting. I had to go.’

  ‘I know the feeling.’ He was richly sympathetic. ‘And it’s never the right time. Only for you, it was.’

  ‘I have to admit it was one hell of a coincidence. I’m there for that plane, trying to convince myself the courier’ll be on it. And when it comes to the point I have to find a loo, and it turns out to be the loo where the courier is! I ask you! It’s stretching credulity a bit.’

  ‘Not that much. In real life coincidences like that happen all the time. Read Arthur Koestler if you don’t believe me. It’s called synchronicity.’

  ‘It is?’ She searched her memory for Arthur Koestler and couldn’t find him there.

  ‘Believe me, you have to trust Nature and this sort of thing is a natural phenomenon.’ He laughed again, a deep burr of satisfaction. ‘If you hadn’t had a call of Nature you’d have missed her. Let’s hear it for Nature.’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose so.’ She stretched. ‘Anyway, I was right, wasn’t I?’

  ‘What about? Julia Arundel? Poor Dr Arundel who is as pure as the driven whatsit and can’t believe what’s been going on behind her back?’

  George had the grace to blush a little. ‘Well, fair enough, I was wrong there, just like Susan Kydd was a good guess, even if that was wrong too. No, I mean about how it was done.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He went over to the table in the corner to fetch more coffee, and waved through the glass at one of the policemen outside to fetch more when he found it empty. ‘You got that right. Well done.’

  She preened. ‘I’m really pleased about that. It was such a sudden realization.’

  ‘Mind you, it was my nice old lady who got it,’ he said as the coffee arrived, brought by Michael Urquhart. ‘Ta, Mike. Shut the door on the other side, will you? Yeah. It was all Vann
y’s doing.’

  ‘Aren’t I to have any credit?’ she said a little plaintively. ‘I mean, who caught Collinson?’

  ‘Your bladder did,’ he said promptly, and she made a face at him.

  They sat and sipped coffee in silence for a while and then she put her cup down with a little clatter. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘We’ve got Collinson’s statement to work on. It wasn’t hard to get it all out of her. I really think she thought she’d never be caught. She had no plan ready for what she might say if she was, not a hint of an alibi or anything like it. And we got a warrant to check her flat and it’s all there, anyway. She kept meticulous records, you know. Very tidy. How Harry Rajabani ever got hold of that stuff from her, I’ll never know.’

  ‘Did she ever do any of the bookwork involved in her scheme at the hospital?’ George asked.

  ‘Oh, sure. She had to. She told me she just went into the Fertility Unit office whenever she had to leave the Paediatric ward and go over to Maternity to see a baby there outside Cherry’s normal office hours, and just helped herself to the names and addresses of people she found there. Then all she had to do was contact them and she had her customers all ready and set.’

  ‘Um,’ George said. ‘Yes, that was the lot we found, wasn’t it? Just part of some names she collected from the Fertility office and then typed up in code on Matty’s typewriter.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I have to admit something,’ George said, not sure why she had to tell him this, but feeling she ought for Cherry’s sake. ‘I wouldn’t let Cherry help me decode that list. If I had she’d have seen at once it was a list of her patients — some of them — complete with physical descriptions to make sure of good matches between babies and adopters. She knows all of them, doesn’t she? But I thought …’ She shrugged. ‘Silly, I know, but it was police business so I kept her out of it.’

  He roared with laughter. ‘It’s OK for you, verboten for her? You really are a right little madam sometimes, George! Oh, don’t look at me like that! You were right to be careful, it just struck me as funny.’

  ‘I thought it would,’ George said sourly.

  ‘You’re forgiven.’ He was very cheerful. ‘We got Collinson, and that’s what matters. She thinks she was doing a public service, you know. Doesn’t see any harm in what happened. Except for the babies she had to swap. She admits that was rough on the parents, but says it’s all right for them really. They can always have another baby. She’s got about as much — oh, I don’t know — understanding of what it’s like to be a woman as — as a fly. How she ever worked as a nurse I’ll never know.’

  ‘I should have realized,’ George said. ‘I spotted quite early on that she couldn’t care less about the job. Not only was she racist — very nasty about Dr Choopani — she just did the paperwork, stayed at her desk, never did anything with the children unless she had to. Not like Goss, dammit. He might be a fascist pig but he was ten times the caring person she was. Odd, isn’t it?’

  ‘Odd? It’s crazy!’ he said. ‘Goss reckons to go on with his career, you know. And there’s not a lot against him doing it. We can get him on offences under the Race Relations Act, but as I understand it that needn’t damage his chances of staying on the Nurses’ Register or whatever it is, or of working. Worries me, that.’

  ‘Worries you?’ she said feelingly. ‘How do you suppose hospital staff feel? We try to kid ourselves we’re all motivated by the highest of principles and then we find out some of us are the same as everyone else. Greedy, selfish, downright wicked. Like Goss. Only his sort of wickedness he can get away with because of the way the world is, and the Collinson sort …’ She shook her head. ‘She did it just for money.’

  ‘It’s a hell of a just for,’ he said. ‘She told me she’s made over a million quid since she started. And I’m not even sure the court can take it away from her even if — or rather when — she’s found guilty and sent down. Her overheads were minimal — the price of air tickets for those girls who want to come here anyway — and they come from all sorts of places, not just Romania. The one who got away from you is a Hungarian, apparently. That’s why she came in earlier than we expected, on the Budapest flight. As I say, all Collinson had to do was pay their fares and give them a risible cash sum and then she got them jobs as au pairs with families willing to ask no questions in exchange for cheap domestic help. The girls liked it well enough — anywhere’s better than Eastern Europe, it seems — and the infertile got their illicit babies, and according to Collinson she’s done a public service.’

  ‘It’s a hell of a public service to kill a baby and a man,’ George said. ‘She makes me feel physically sick, you know that?’

  ‘You surprise me.’ He looked genuinely puzzled. ‘You cut up bodies and paddle around in guts in a way that makes most people feel really very peculiar indeed — I have to concentrate not to get myself in a state over your PMs — and yet faced with a bit of common-or-garden human greed and selfishness you get all queasy. Odd that.’

  ‘Not odd at all,’ she said passionately. ‘Bodies aren’t ugly and selfish and — human bodies are beautiful. Beautifully arranged, beautifully planned, magnificently organized. It’s minds that …’ She shivered a little. ‘I think I ought to take an update course in forensic psychology. Maybe I’d feel better about all this then.’

  ‘That’s all I’m short of,’ he said. ‘Jesus! Imagine you going around analysing minds all over the place. It’d be hell.’

  ‘You reckon? I’ll have to do it then.’ There was a short silence and then she said, ‘How did she kill Harry? I mean which car?’

  ‘I’m embarrassed about that and can’t deny it. It was her car. It’s been sitting there in the hospital car park in the open all this time. I’ve given Roop hell over it. It never occurred to me it wouldn’t occur to him to look there, but he didn’t ever think there could be a connection with the hospital, would you believe. He can be bloody stupid sometimes — but that’s just between us. It wouldn’t do if it got out I’d been slagging him off to you.’

  She was flattered. ‘You can trust me.’

  ‘I know that. Anyway, that’s how we missed checking her car. She used that to run him down, but after the weathering it’s had, the chances of there being any evidence left is slim. Not that it matters too much, thank Gawd. She talked willingly enough.’

  ‘How did she get him there? To the pub, I mean.’

  Gus shook his head. ‘It was Harry himself who did it. He asked her to meet him there. He’d worked out that there was something going on, that some of the people who came into Paediatrics to see Patricia Collinson were not strictly kosher, and he wanted to get it out of her. He’d found the lists, is my guess — she’d typed them, of course, not him. He had broken the code though. So he wanted to talk to her. He chose the place. She dressed in that sort of anonymous stuff that made the landlord think she was a bloke — she wasn’t trying to fool anyone. Just wanted to look ordinary, she said — and then ran him over. It was a thing she did on the spur of the moment. No planning at all. He’d rattled her badly telling her he knew and she didn’t want to stop her racket. She hit him with the jack from her car, which she keeps on her front seat in case of trouble — I ask you! — and was going to just leave him there. And then after she got in her car she just went for him. Poor bastard. Stupid bastard …’

  ‘And then she went back and parked the car and that was all?’ George was incredulous.

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘You can say that again. Bloody Roop. Not to have checked the hospital car park …’

  ‘How about the baby she killed?’ It seemed politic to change the subject, and George saw no point in nagging about the car. Anyway, it wouldn’t have made much difference if they had found it, after all; Collinson could quite easily have said she’d left it unlocked and available to any sneak thief. ‘She was very careless about that, wasn’t she? Leaving the plastic bag over t
he head. If she hadn’t, it could have seemed a cot death like the others, even though it was dumped the way it was.’

  ‘She’s been careless from the start. She never really thought anything through properly. She had arranged for the Hillmans to bring Teddy in to the Paediatric department so that she could have a look at him and sort out what was going on. But she didn’t make sure she was there to meet ‘em when they arrived. It would have been all right for her if she’d done that. They never met her, only talked on the phone. So she’d have been safe enough. But when they arrived she wasn’t waiting for them at the door as she should have been — she says that herself now — and Prudence Jennings was on duty and took one look at the child and scooped him up. Collinson wouldn’t have let a doctor near him if she’d planned it right. She’d have admitted him, killed him quietly — another cot death, it’d have seemed — and that would have been that. She’d have got the Hillmans another baby, she said. As though they were like — like fridges or freezers, things you can swap if the first one isn’t up to quality.’ He grimaced. ‘It is sickening, at that.’

  ‘I’m glad you agree.’ George was a little sardonic. ‘Because a woman who can kill a baby and leave the plastic bag over its head when she dumps it has to be some nasty piece of work.’

  ‘Yeah, I agree. But for once she did think. Sort of. She left the bag because she said she didn’t want to take any chances of any infected material reaching her from its mouth and nose, seeing the child had AIDS. Would you believe it? But there you go, she’s all of a piece, I suppose. No surprises about her. Though there would have been, if it had been Julia Arundel, wouldn’t there? Agreed?’

  George bit her lip. ‘I suppose so. No doctor who obviously cared as much about her patients as she did could have been quite so — Well, I was wrong, OK? No need to rub it in.’

  ‘Would I rub it in?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There was another silence and then George said, ‘Has anyone told the Popodopoulos family or the Chowdarys yet?’