A Woman Worth Waiting For

by Meredith Webber

  ‘So you had to find the tapes to show you’d acted correctly?’

  ‘And only just got them. They were due to be run through the cameras again that night!’

  ‘Perhaps Security should start keeping them two months before reusing them—in case it takes some patients longer to get to their lawyer.’

  She caught the teasing note in his voice and smiled again, but said seriously, ‘I think you’re right. In fact, I’ll suggest it.’

  What she didn’t suggest was for him to accompany her through the back entrance, merely nodding goodbye to him and disappearing through the automatic doors, her mind, no doubt, intent on talking to someone in Security.

  Max made his way around the end of the building to where the ‘walk-in’ public was admitted to A and E. The place was buzzing, people chatting to each other like old friends as they waited for their numbers to be called.

  He listened in, and realised the bond between the strangers was formed through mutual suffering—of the waiting times, not their individual aches, pains or illnesses.

  ‘Three hours I was here last time,’ one woman announced, silencing a man who’d had the temerity to complain about waiting an hour and a half on a previous visit.

  ‘Mr Wellings to cubicle three,’ the clerk announced, and several people turned to study Mr Wellings, perhaps wondering what secret he’d used to be selected.

  ‘He’s a regular,’ the woman told her new-found friend.

  ‘Shouldn’t regulars go to Outpatients? Isn’t that for regulars?’

  ‘I think he’s regular with different things. Dicky knee one week, bad head the next. One of those hyperchronic people.’

  ‘Well, if I was one of them, sitting here for an hour every week’d soon cure me.’

  The man picked up a magazine and proceeded to read, while the woman stood up and ambled over to the window. From the chatty way she addressed the clerk, she was also a regular.

  ‘How else could she know who the man was?’ Ginny asked, when he, Ginny and Sarah were taking a quick tea-break some hours later.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said, though with the third smile of the morning it was a miracle he could think at all.

  ‘Do you get many regulars?’ Sarah asked. ‘In bigger departments it’s not as easy to keep track of who’s who, but I guess in a place this size you’d know them.’

  ‘A few. More “wet-weather” admissions—street people who wander in when the weather’s foul, looking for a dry place to spend the night.’

  The sympathy she felt for these people weighted her voice, making Max ask, ‘Do you admit them?’

  She smiled—fourth time—and said, ‘You obviously haven’t heard about the disgraceful conditions in public hospitals! Patients forced to spend the night on gurneys in corridors while waiting for a bed to become vacant!’

  He chuckled.

  ‘I hadn’t realised the situation got worse in wet weather.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ Ginny said stoutly. ‘Not officially. It’s more a question of location. Isn’t that what real estate agents always push?’

  ‘As in location, location, location?’ Sarah’s voice echoed the mystification Max was feeling, though the mystification was minor compared to the physical symptoms Ginny’s presence—not to mention smiles—continued to cause.

  ‘We’re not far from the river. In fact, it’s just beyond the car park. A lovely quiet stretch of river-bank with steepish sides that discourage casual passers-by. It also has a lot of scrubby bush on the bank, ideal homes for those who like a water view. But all the “real” shelters for homeless people are in the centre of town…’

  ‘The hospital is closer?’

  Ginny smiled at him again.

  ‘Much!’ she said, then she turned towards an orderly who’d appeared with what looked like a note of some kind.

  She glanced briefly at it then excused herself, hurrying towards the lifts at the far end of the long room.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about the intervals,’ Sarah said, interrupting his analysis of Ginny’s walk. ‘Ginny was talking about them earlier. Do you have the dates each girl was killed?’

  ‘In my notebook somewhere,’ he said, reaching into his shirt pocket and pulling out a small, dog-eared, brown, vinyl-covered notebook. ‘Unfortunately I’ve never got around to organising it properly. I just write down what I hear, or think of, then have to search through to find things.’

  He was leafing through it as he spoke, but a nurse signalled to Sarah at that moment, and he realised her break was over.

  ‘I’ll write them down for you,’ he told her. After all, it was public knowledge and had been printed in the papers, so she could have found the information elsewhere.

  ‘Thanks!’ She flashed him a grateful smile, which, while nice enough, failed to affect his pulse or breathing.

  Though Ginny’s reappearance—pausing to speak to Sarah about halfway down the room—definitely did the trick.

  Get back to work, he told himself.

  Now!

  An approaching siren convinced him. He left the ‘real’ doctors to their work and returned to the waiting room, where some of the faces had changed but the complaints about the service were as vociferous as ever.

  From time to time, Ginny flashed across the end of the room, striding swiftly to somewhere beyond the waiting room.

  X-Ray perhaps?

  He knew it was none of his business where she went or what she did, and reminded himself it was stress he was studying, not a particular doctor.

  But he still glanced up every time he saw movement at the far end of the room. Perhaps tomorrow he’d go behind the scenes, see the activity from the doctors’ point of view rather than the patients’. That way, at least he’d get to see her most of the day.

  ‘Sorry! It’s my day off and I’m not coming anywhere near the place. You’ll have to ask Sarah’s permission!’

  The working day was over, and they were sitting in the canteen, waiting for Sarah, who, in the absence of any available government medical Officer, had been asked to perform the autopsy on the fourth strangled victim.

  ‘If she ever comes back,’ Max grumbled. He was annoyed with himself for making the suggestion prematurely. If he’d known it was Ginny’s day off, he would have put off his visit backstage. Maybe stayed at the flat doing paperwork…asked her to lunch…

  ‘Did you find anything significant?’

  Ginny’s question, obviously not directed at him, made him look up from his musings to find Sarah pulling out a chair.

  ‘Sorry to keep you both waiting,’ she began, then she shook her head. ‘And, no, in answer to your question, Ginny. ‘Though…’ She hesitated.

  ‘Though?’ Ginny queried.

  ‘She’d had a good meal—steak, mushrooms, wine, chocolate something, possibly mud cake—not long before she died. In fact, if we take off the time she was in ER, it was probably less than an hour before she was brought in.’

  Sarah looked at them both, perhaps trying to decide whether to share whatever it was she was thinking.

  Then she nodded decisively and said, ‘I can’t see that it’s classified information, but it worried me. It wasn’t the kind of meal a young working girl would cook for herself or eat on her own. I kept thinking maybe he’d bought her a meal—like on a date—and then killed her.’

  She paused again, then in a rush, as if confessing something she shouldn’t have done, she said, ‘I checked the file copies of the other autopsies. The first two women, although they weren’t found as quickly so the specifics couldn’t be ascertained as clearly, had also had what might be thought of as a fancy meal only a short time before they died.’

  ‘The first two?’ Ginny asked. ‘Not Isobel?’

  Sarah shook her head, then she grinned.

  ‘But there’s a possible explanation for that. Would a woman from a wealthy family be tempted by being taken out to dinner? I’ve always thought that if I had money, I’d eat out every night. May
be the killer bribed her or interested her—intrigued her—in some other way.’

  Ginny considered this, then she, too, shook her head, though more dismissively than Sarah had.

  ‘Isobel doesn’t fit, does she?’

  She directed the question at Max, certain he knew more than he was saying. Besides, it was an excuse to look at him, to see the strong delineation of the bones beneath the pale olive skin of his face.

  To remember the kiss.

  ‘Asks a question and then doesn’t listen to the answer,’ he said, smiling as if he’d guessed her thoughts. ‘I asked in what way she doesn’t fit.’

  Ginny marshalled her brain cells.

  ‘She wasn’t single, and she didn’t work in a public place—well, not public like a department store or a hairdresser.’

  ‘Was she likely to have seen or counselled other rape victims recently?’ Sarah asked. ‘Learned something from one that might have led to the person responsible? Doesn’t rape sometimes escalate to murder?’

  She asked Max the questions, leaving Ginny free to watch the way his brow furrowed slightly as he considered how to answer. Free to feel again all the subtle manifestations of the love which had first awakened six years ago.

  ‘I think the police have looked at the differences between the victims,’ he said, and Ginny guessed he was choosing his words with care.

  Too much care?

  ‘Including what they had or hadn’t eaten,’ Sarah said, with gentle self-mockery. ‘Of course they would have! And they’d be looking at the time intervals as well.’

  She glanced at Ginny.

  ‘After you mentioned time intervals, Max wrote down the dates for me. It’s really weird because they seem too regular,’ Sarah said. ‘As if someone had a special plan and had been working to a specific timetable, right from the beginning.’

  She dug a piece of paper out of her jacket pocket and spread it on the table.

  ‘I looked at them earlier. Three weeks, three weeks, two weeks—a Monday each time.’

  She glanced across at Max.

  ‘I know it’s dangerous to generalise, but are serial killers usually so mathematically predictable? My impression, from the little I’ve read, was that although the intervals shortened they didn’t do it quite so systematically. And if the hunt is part of their fantasy, wouldn’t they prolong it?’

  Max studied the two women. How much could he tell them?

  And if he told them nothing, how close would Sarah come in her guesses? Ginny, too, who was teasing away at the question of security cameras.

  ‘Perhaps he’s free on a Monday,’ Sarah suggested. ‘He might have a day off work.’

  ‘But apart from the fantasy, if he’s studying the victim first,’ Ginny broke in before Max could follow Sarah’s idea, ‘the shorter intervals must make things difficult. I mean, would a week be enough to not only find the right girl but establish enough of a rapport to ask her out to dinner?’

  She paused, then added, ‘Unless he started earlier. Lined them all up before he began. Have they identified last night’s victim yet? If they have, and there are security videos, perhaps he was on it more often than he appeared in the earlier ones.’

  ‘Security cameras?’

  Sarah asked the question and Ginny explained the camera conversation.

  ‘But would he be meeting the girls at work? What about nightclubs? Coffee shops? Wherever young people hang out these days? Wouldn’t that be more natural?’

  Max nodded, suddenly depressed as the frustration of trying to predict aberrant behaviour threatened to swamp him.

  ‘So far the police haven’t found a common meeting place. One girl liked tenpin bowling, the two others had never tried it. One was a regular churchgoer, the other two went rarely and never respectively.’

  ‘Coffee-shops near where they worked?’ Sarah persisted.

  ‘They worked in different parts of town—well, one in the inner city, one in a suburban mall and Isobel here.’

  Ginny must have sensed his change of mood for she reached out and touched his hand.

  ‘Maybe identifying this fourth victim will pull some threads together,’ she said softly.

  He wanted to cover her hand with his own, to capture the slim fingers and never let them go. But they’d already lifted and soon disappeared beneath the table, as if to hide from further temptation.

  And Ginny was smiling again, but not at him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘I BELIEVE we’re all fellow flatmates,’ Paul Markham said, reaching their table and pausing beside it. He, too, was smiling—specifically at Ginny, Max thought, although the remark was generalised.

  Max wondered if the emotion he was feeling was jealousy, brought on by this man’s apparent interest in Ginny. Or was it something more? An instinctive distrust of someone as smoothly handsome, as transparently good-looking as Paul Markham?

  He was berating himself for judging by appearances when Ginny spoke.

  ‘You’ve shifted into the fourth flat?’ she said, not bothering to hide her disbelief. ‘I saw your car there last night and thought you must be helping a friend shift. Why on earth would you want to live in such a—?’

  ‘Dump?’ Paul Markham said, so ingratiatingly that Max felt his dislike deepen.

  ‘Well, I could hardly say dump when I live in one of the flats myself,’ Ginny responded, merriment positively trilling in her voice.

  It was unseemly, that’s what it was, to have him smiling and laughing with Ginny when his wife was barely cold in her grave.

  Max the psychologist recognised unfairness in this reaction, but Max the man felt only suspicion of the other man’s motives. Why shift in, if he wasn’t interested in Ginny?

  ‘You’re growling again,’ Sarah whispered to him, but it was what she’d done with her hand that brought him more sharply back to reality. She’d covered the list of dates and 71 slid it off the table, tucking it discreetly back into her pocket.

  He supposed it was done from tact, but he gave her a closer look before turning his attention—without growling—back to the conversation on the opposite side of the table.

  ‘Couldn’t stand the emptiness any longer,’ Paul was saying, as if that explained why he’d shifted from what Ginny had described as a huge home into a very basic hospital flat. ‘I got the keys and checked it out after work last night, then went home to pack some stuff and move in enough to make it comfortable. It took quite a few trips back and forth and even then I forgot things like breakfast cereal so I had to go back to the house this morning.’

  Now Ginny was patting the man’s hand. Max stifled another growl, but he couldn’t stop his disbelief showing.

  ‘Surely a hotel or serviced apartment would have suited you better,’ he said.

  ‘But not you?’ Paul retorted.

  ‘Ah, but I’m only a poor researcher, not a specialist on his way up the ladder.’

  It was only slight, but he caught a shift in Paul’s pose, a tightening that signified more interest than his casual ‘Oh, what kind of research?’ suggested.

  ‘Stress!’ Sarah answered for him, chuckling as she spoke. ‘Where better than a hospital to find a surfeit of the stuff?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Ginny broke in. ‘I haven’t introduced you, Paul. Working at the hospital it’s easy to assume everyone knows everyone else, if only by reputation.’

  And his, from all accounts, is spotless, Max thought as he stood up and dutifully acknowledged Ginny’s politeness by shaking the man’s hand.

  As slimy as his smile, Max thought, then had to smile himself. There’d been nothing wrong with the handshake—nothing at all. Or with the smile, or the man, most likely. In fact, in other circumstances, they might have had a beer together.

  ‘Will you walk me home, Max?’

  Sarah was also on her feet, and the fingers she dug into his arm muscles gave him no choice but to agree.

  ‘He’s about to ask her out to dinner,’ Sarah whispered at him as she hustle
d him out of the canteen. ‘I could feel him leading up to it—talk of having to shop and all that. I guessed if you heard it you’d start growling again.’

  She paused and turned to look at him. ‘You could have asked her out yourself, you know.’

  ‘Why?’

  His companion gave an exasperated sigh.

  ‘Because you like her—that much is obvious. Whatever happened when you first knew each other, there’s still something between you.’

  ‘Then why’s she smiling at that toad?’

  Sarah chuckled.

  ‘You have got it bad, haven’t you? She’s smiling at that good-looking and very pleasant man because he’s just that—good-looking and pleasant. I’d say she also feels sorry for him, and feels he needs company and comfort. She might also need some company and comfort herself, if your sudden reappearance in her life has thrown her as much as it has muddled you.’

  Max had to smile, then he shook his head, took Sarah’s arm and said, ‘I know. Let’s go back inside and ask them to join us for dinner. Do you know this town at all? Know anywhere to eat?’

  His smile grew to what must have seemed cartoon-like proportions as he added, ‘That should spike his guns, shouldn’t it?’

  Sarah turned around to return to the canteen. Taking her movement for agreement, he accompanied her back through the doors, towards where Paul was now sitting with Ginny.

  They were halfway there when Sarah stopped suddenly and once again turned to face him—once again grasping his arm.

  ‘The m-meal thing d-doesn’t make sense!’ she stuttered. ‘I mean, if a man takes a girl out to dinner, people see them together. Restaurant staff serve them. Surely they’d have recognised a customer from the photos—asked each other if it wasn’t the woman who’d been in with such-and-such a bloke.’

  Max sighed.

  Sarah’s words had reminded him he was here for a purpose—not to chase after Ginny!

  ‘You’re right,’ he told Sarah. ‘And the police have foot-slogged their way around every restaurant in the town, showing the first two victims’ pictures, asking if anyone remembers seeing either of them, alone or in company, on the nights of their deaths or any other time.’