Lady Amanda showed Hugo how to open the cage-like doors, and entered with him, to instruct him in the use of the contraption should he wish to visit the first floor. Unfortunately, the lift did not travel up to the second floor, or to the attics, so maybe he’d have to wait until after his raft of mobility-improving operations before being ambitious enough to tackle exploring at those levels.
There was barely room for two people in the little cage, let alone two stout people, and to begin with they were jammed in back to back, and had to indulge in a perfect fandango of wriggling, to end up both facing front, and in a position to exit the lift, when it reached its destination.
She indicated to Hugo the button that would close the metal doors, then the button which would open them again. Finally, she pointed out the button which would cause the lift to ascend to the first floor. Pressing the ‘doors open’ button, she instructed Hugo to take them upstairs, as a test of how well he had absorbed her simple instructions.
‘I can’t, Manda,’ he pleaded helplessly. ‘The doors are still open.’
‘You dolt, Hugo! That’s part of using the thing. Close the doors, take us upstairs, then open the doors to let us out. Nothing could be simpler!’
For a few minutes, the lift doors slowly ground closed, then open again: closed, then open again. ‘May I suggest that somewhere in the procedure, you actually use the ascend button, Hugo, old bean,’ advised Lady Amanda, not cross, but merely amused by his ineptitude.
‘I’m terribly sorry, old stick, but I can’t seem to remember which button takes us up. Can you just go through the procedure again for me, then I’m sure I shall be able to do it without fault.’
It took a good half hour, but by the end of that time, Hugo was as proficient at ascending and descending in the lift as if he had been operating it all his life. ‘I say, old girl, this is jolly rot isn’t it, being able to go upstairs without all that darned climbing?’ he exclaimed.
‘Save your poor old legs no end, won’t it?’ she offered, in agreement.
Lady Amanda also took him round the various ramps that Beauchamp had restored to their previous positions, and she ascertained that none of them was too steep or too narrow for Hugo to negotiate with his walking frame.
Apart from that, they did little more than take a slow – very slow – toddle in the grounds, and play a few hands of piquet. Monday was to be an unusually busy day, and they both wanted to conserve their strength, for the stamina they would need to find, to get through both Hugo’s appointment with the consultant, collecting Enid Tweedie from the hospital ward, and seeing her safely installed in her temporary lodgings.
Lady Amanda had got Beauchamp to drop into the hospital grounds, on their way back from the nursing home, so that she could inform Edith of her upcoming role of ‘undercover spy’, and why this was necessary; so the stage was set. They had only to wait for curtain-up, the following morning.
Hugo had been offered another lesson in riding the trike, even though he had not yet had the displeasure of actually trying to ride it himself, but had politely refused, and received another stay of execution by the ringing of the telephone.
There was nothing to do now, but wait.
Chapter Six
Monday morning dawned bright and sunny, and they reached the hospital’s main entrance with fifteen minutes to spare – just as well, considering how long it would take to get Hugo down the various corridors, and up in the lifts to reach the necessary waiting area. On their way, however, a kindly nurse had seen their difficulty, and promptly fetched them a wheelchair to hasten their progress.
Although Hugo had protested about being pushed around in a bath-chair, like an elderly Edwardian gentleman, the nurse’s pretty smile had persuaded him, and she had then volunteered to wheel Hugo to his destination, to Lady Amanda’s obvious relief. He was no lightweight, and she was no stripling, and the whole journey through the maze of corridors was leaving her exhausted and disorientated, so that she actually had no idea whether they had been travelling in the correct direction or not.
With the nurse’s help, they reached their destination with five minutes to spare, going through the double doors to the waiting area, only for the most ghastly sight to greet their eyes.
Chairs arranged down two sides of the wall contained waiting patients, but all appeared to be liberally doused in blood, and it looked like a massacre had just taken place. Lady Amanda emitted a foghorn-like scream, and Hugo expressed his horror and distress by uttering, ‘Oh dear!’ and shaking his head from side to side in disbelief.
A distressed nurse, only now noticed by them, was looking horror-stricken, and paging someone on the in-house telephone, to come to her assistance. In the middle of the floor lay a blood bag – obviously headed somewhere for transfusion – that she must have dropped, loosening its seal. As she explained to them briefly, it had then squirted out its contents in all directions, with the vigour of a deflating balloon, and liberally sprayed all those waiting to see Dr Updyke.
At the sound of the fuss, the great man himself appeared in the doorway of his consulting room, looked around in amazement at the devastation, and the apparently mutilated patients, caught sight of Lady Amanda, and pointed an accusing finger at her.
‘You again!’ he boomed. ‘This is all your doing, isn’t it? Call the police, someone! There’s a homicidal maniac on the loose. She’s had one go at me already, and now she’s starting in on my patients.’
Lady Amanda had gazed upon his features with horror, too. That was the bounder who had nearly had her off her trike, if her memory served her correctly. Dr Andrew had told her so, but she’d forgotten all about that. Crumbs! ‘Hugo,’ she hissed, as quietly as possible. ‘That’s the cad who wandered in front of my tricycle, and ended up in the shrubbery.’
Hugo had the grace to blush, at this disturbing admission, and hoped this would not be held against him during his consultation. He idly wondered if he ought, or even if he dared, perhaps, to try to get Manda to remain in the waiting area, but he knew this was a non-starter, as soon as the thought entered his head. Manda did as she pleased and, at the moment, she was looking after him, and looking after him meant going in to the doctor’s office with him. No go!
It took longer than it should have done to calm down the consultant and explain the situation to him, because he was so wary of Lady Amanda but, finally, all was peaceful again, and it turned out to be Hugo’s turn to be seen, which was quite all right with Lady Amanda. That little pantomime had filled in the time they would otherwise have wasted waiting in silence, and been jolly entertaining to boot.
When they were seated in the consulting room, Lady Amanda apologised very prettily for the unfortunate circumstances that had prevailed at their previous meeting, and Dr Updyke thawed a few degrees, from permafrost, to just well-chilled.
She was delighted to note that, when he addressed Hugo, he pronounced his name completely accurately, and she smiled at the consultant, to mark her approval. She had related the trike incident to Hugo on the day he had moved into Belchester Towers, with the post scriptum of her fine for speeding, and he had laughed like a drain, and exclaimed, ‘Good old Manda!’
Lady Amanda’s smile slightly unnerved Dr Updyke, but he pulled up the e-mail on his computer from Dr Andrew, and began to question him about his current treatment.
‘I’m afraid I don’t really have any,’ apologised Hugo, looking slightly embarrassed at his dearth of pills and potions, as if it were, somehow, his fault. ‘My last doctor just told me to take paracetamol, and accept it as part and parcel of old age,’ he informed the consultant.
‘Outrageous!’ Updyke exploded. ‘Who exactly was this previous doctor of yours?’
‘Dr Anstruther,’ Hugo stated, and both he and Lady Amanda watched as the medical man turned scarlet with wrath.
‘Silly old fool should either have retired, or been struck off the Medical Register years ago. The real toll of the harm he’s done will never be uncovered, but his tr
eatment of you is typical of the man. He’s too old to care, too old to understand modern treatments, and only carries on for the money. Disgraceful!’
The doctor had now thawed completely, and examined Hugo with the tenderness of a mother examining her child. ‘Right, Mr Cholmondley-Crichton-Crump, I’m going to send you off for some X-rays now, and for blood tests. I want to see you again in a week. The receptionist in the waiting area will make a follow-up appointment for you.
‘In the meantime, I’m going to give you a prescription which you can have filled at the hospital pharmacy, for some jolly strong painkillers and some anti-inflammatory pills. They should ease things for you, and we can follow on from there. I have a fair idea of what the X-rays will show, and I have to warn you that it could be a double hip-replacement and a double knee-replacement for you.
‘If this proves so, it will take some time – maybe a year or two – to get everything done, but I can assure you that it will give you a completely new lease of life. If you have any questions, make a note of them, and bring them along to your next appointment, which I sincerely hope,’ here, Dr Updyke paused to give a little chuckle, ‘will not commence with a bloodbath. Haha!’
He shook hands as they left, in quite a good humour, and it was only as they made to exit his consulting room, that his expression turned to a slight frown of puzzlement. That woman had seemed perfectly OK today, but what was she? Some kind of Jekyll and Hyde personality? When she had come roaring at him on that tricycle of hers, she had looked just like a Valkyrie in full flight. Today she had been as polite as was to be expected, given who she was, and her station in life. He just hoped that he never had the misfortune to encounter the Valkyrie side of her personality again.
The wheelchair had been left in the waiting area, and was still there when they came out. The receptionist, having noticed how slowly Hugo walked into the consulting room, had kindly summoned a porter to push him to wherever he was fated to go next.
Clutching his fistful of forms and the prescription, Hugo lowered himself gratefully into the seat, and made his trips to the X-ray department, to have his blood taken, and to the hospital pharmacy, with un-hoped for swiftness, and they found themselves back at Belchester Towers in time for lunch, a goal believed unattainable by Lady Amanda, when they had set out on their trip, earlier.
A short nap after lunch to eliminate the rigours of the morning, saw them awake and alert again, at three o’clock, and preparing to go to collect Enid from her hospital discharge, and settle her in at the home.
When they located Enid’s bed in Robin Ward, she was already dressed, and sitting on a bedside chair, her bag packed and waiting beside her, her discharge papers clutched in her right hand.
‘The doctor came round early,’ she excused herself for being ready to leave before time. ‘I’ve been sitting here for almost an hour.’
‘Do you good to be out of bed,’ commented Lady Amanda, gruffly and unsympathetically. ‘By the way, I don’t think you’ve met my long-lost friend Hugo,’ she stated, having noticed Enid staring at Hugo in an interrogatory way. She rarely saw Lady Amanda in company with a gentleman friend, and she was naturally curious.
‘May I introduce you to Hugo Cholmondley-Crichton-Crump?’ Enid was fascinated to meet someone with such an exotic-sounding name, and even more so, when Lady Amanda wrote it down for her to see.
‘So it’s pronounced as you said it, but it’s spelled like this?’ she asked incredulously.
‘That’s right, Enid.’
‘I’ve never met anyone before who had a name that sounded differently to what it looked like on paper,’ she added, in wonder.
‘Well, you have now, so come on, let’s get weaving. Now, you know that you’re our eyes and ears in that home, don’t you? Good! We need to find out who was impersonating Reggie’s nephew, what he looked like, and – if you’re really good at this – where he might have come across Reggie, to pull a fast one on him and the staff there, like that. Got it? Good!’
The hospital provided a nurse to wheel Enid to the main hospital doors in a chair, and she then transferred into the Rolls, evidently enjoying herself immensely, and acting like Lady Bountiful, as she climbed into the vintage vehicle.
Their destination was only a couple of hundred yards away, but that didn’t stop Enid savouring every second of it. Being in a Rolls-Royce wasn’t an everyday occurrence for her, and she noticed how people stopped and stared at it, as it passed. Lucky, lucky, Lady Amanda! And she just took this sort of thing for granted!
At The Birdlings, she was clearly delighted with her room, and the thought that she could just take it easy for a week, and be waited on, hand foot and finger – something she had not appreciated in the hospital, due to the way she had felt after her operation, and the fact that the hospital kitchens seemed to have a contract with the operating theatre staff, regarding the provision of meat. There had been far too much offal on the menu for her liking, anything including meat had been unidentifiable, and had left her feeling very suspicious of the source of their butchery requisitions.
After having been shown the room, and its meagre facilities, Lady Amanda turned on Enid and said, ‘I suggest that you try speaking to Nurse Plunkett. She doesn’t seem very happy here, and has been sent by an agency. I think she’d be willing to give you any of the dirt she knows about on this place, just for the sheer pleasure of it.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ responded Enid Tweedie, looking slightly worried, now she was actually installed here and on the job, so to speak.
‘You will do better than that, Enid. You will make me proud of you!’ was Lady Amanda’s uncompromising reply, and was not so much a prediction, as an order. ‘We’ll visit every day – don’t want to trust important information in a case of murder to the phone lines. Don’t know who might be listening in,’ she added, somewhat melodramatically, in Hugo’s opinion. This wasn’t Sexton Blake: this was real life, and real life was safer than fiction, or so he thought, then.
When they finally returned to Belchester Towers, it was too late for afternoon tea, so Lady Amanda requested that dinner be brought forward a little, to compensate, and Hugo announced that he needed another little lie-down, as it was some time since he had been so active.
‘Really, Hugo! You spent most of the time we were at the hospital being pushed around in that wheelchair. How can you possibly be tired again?’ Lady Amanda asked, casting a sceptical eye over him, and realising that he really did look worn out. ‘Never mind! Can’t be helped! Off you toddle, and don’t worry about me. I’ll find something to occupy my time,’ at which point the old pull-style front door bell rang, and she exclaimed in triumph, ‘Here we go. I said something would turn up.’
The something that turned up was a representative from the Social Services department, with a wheelchair for Hugo to use, until such time as he was more mobile. ‘Dr Andrew phoned and ordered it,’ the gentleman at the door explained. ‘If you’d just like to sign here – and here – and here? Thank you very much, madam.’
‘That’s ‘my lady’ to you,’ she informed him haughtily, and took charge of Hugo’s new chariot. ‘Hey, Chummy, just before you toddle off to bed, look what Dr Andrew’s sent round for you. Fantastic, eh?’
‘If you like that sort of thing,’ replied Hugo, turning his back and shuffling off in the direction of his bedroom, which was where he liked it – on the ground floor, where he felt safest.
Abandoning the new carriage, which Beauchamp could take care of, as far as finding somewhere to stash it was concerned, Lady Amanda arranged her face in a determined expression, removed an old crash helmet of Mummy’s from a cupboard, and stumped purposefully off, out of the house, and towards the stables.
She was determined to get the hand of the motorised trike while Hugo was napping. She’d had Beauchamp try it out himself, leaving any alterations or improvements to its running in his capable hands, and was now ready to get ‘back on the horse’ so to speak. It may have beaten her once, bu
t it wouldn’t be given another chance. She would master it, or die in the attempt.
When Hugo entered the drawing room after his nap, still a little bleary-eyed, he found Lady Amanda sitting on a sofa, her hair wildly out of place, oil smudges on her face and hands, and a triumphant expression on her face.
‘Been taming the wild beast,’ she said, by way of explanation, and when Hugo’s face broke into a study of incomprehension, explained in more detail:
‘That motorised tricycle that Beauchamp fixed up for you. I’ve had him do a few alterations, and I’ve just about mastered driving the thing. It’s nowhere near as excitable as it was last time we had it out, and I think it’s time you learned to ride it.
‘Oh, not now, you silly,’ she added, watching fear creep across his features. ‘Maybe tomorrow, before we go to visit Enid for her fist debrief of the case. We won’t go until after lunch – give her time to settle in, so there’ll be plenty of time in the morning. The funeral’s not till Wednesday, so we’ve got time on our hands, and nothing planned to fill it. Are you up for it, old chap?’
‘Only if you ride it first, so that I can see it’s not wild and dangerous, as it was when you tried it out before.’
‘Of course I’ll demonstrate,’ she assured him, pleased to be able to demonstrate how proficient she had become at controlling the bloody-minded contraption in so short a time. ‘I’ll give you a performance, explain everything, then you can have a go – and if you wear Daddy’s old crash helmet, we should be prepared, in the event of a mishap.’
Hugo didn’t like the sound of this last bit, but he was game to try it out, and nodded in agreement before his hostess went on, not waiting for a spoken answer from him.
‘Six o’clock, and time for a bit of a belter, I think, don’t you, Hugo?’ This was another rhetorical question, and Hugo wisely recognised it and remained silent. He’d have to get used to those rhetorical doo-dahs again. ‘Where’s that Beau … Oh, there you are! I didn’t hear you come in. Quelle surprise! Now, pass the tray to Hugo first as he’s a guest, then I’ll have mine. Thank you very much, Beauchamp.’
Strangeways to Oldham Page 6
