“I’m sorry,” said Gloria, with an impatient shake of the head, “this probably doesn’t seem relevant at all, but it is, if you just bear with me…”
“Take your time,” said Strike.
“Well… the day after my eighteenth birthday, Luca and I got into a row. I can’t remember what it was about, but he put his hand round my throat and pushed me up against the wall until I couldn’t breathe. I was terrified.
“He let go, but there was this horrible look in his eye. He said, ‘You’ve got only yourself to blame.’ And he said, ‘You’re starting to sound like that doctor.’
“I’d talked to him quite a lot about Margot, you see. I’d told him she was a complete killjoy, really bossy and opinionated. I kept repeating things she’d said, to denigrate them, to tell myself there was nothing in them.
“She quoted Simone de Beauvoir once, during a staff meeting. She’d sworn when she dropped her pen, and Dr. Brenner said, ‘People are always asking me what it’s like working with a lady doctor, and if I ever meet one, I’ll be able to tell them.’ Dorothy laughed—she hardly ever laughed—and Margot snapped right back at him—I know the quotation off by heart now, in French, too—‘Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female—whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.’
“Irene and I talked about it afterward. We called her a show-off for quoting some French woman, but things like that got in my head and I couldn’t get them out again. I thought I wanted to be a fifties Mafia housewife, but sometimes Margot was really funny, and I watched her never backing down to Brenner, and you couldn’t help admiring her for it…”
Gloria took yet another gulp of wine.
“Anyway, the evening Luca half-throttled me, I went home and lay awake crying half the night. The next morning, I put on a polo-neck for work to hide the bruises, and at five o’clock that afternoon, when I left work, I went straight to a call box near the surgery, rang Luca and finished with him. I told him he’d scared me and that I didn’t want to see him any more.
“He took it quite quietly. I was surprised, but so relieved… for three or four days I thought it was all over, and I felt amazing. It was like waking up, or coming up for air after being underwater. I still wanted to be a mobster’s girlfriend, but the fantasy version was fine. I’d had a little bit too much contact with reality.
“Then, at the end of our practice Christmas party, in walked Luca, with his father and one of his cousins.
“I was absolutely terrified to see them there. Luca said to me, ‘Dad just wanted to meet my girlfriend.’ And—I don’t know why, except I was petrified of there being a scene—I just said, ‘Oh, OK.’ And I grabbed my coat and left with the three of them, before anyone could talk to them.
“They walked me to my bus stop. On the way, Nico said, ‘You’re a nice girl. Luca was very upset by what you said to him on the phone. He’s very fond of you, you know. You don’t want to make him unhappy, do you?’ Then he and Luca’s cousin walked away. Luca said, ‘You didn’t mean what you said, did you?’ And I… I was so scared. Him bringing his father and cousin along… I told myself I’d be able to get out of it later. Just keep him happy for now. So I said, ‘No, I didn’t mean it. You won’t do anything like that ever again, though, will you?’ And he said, ‘Like what?’ As if he’d never pressed on my windpipe till I couldn’t breathe. As though I’d imagined it.
“So, we carried on seeing each other,” said Gloria. “Luca started talking about getting married. I kept saying I felt too young. Every time I came close to ending it, he’d accuse me of cheating on him, which was the worst crime of all, and there was no way of proving I wasn’t, except to keep going out with him.”
Now Gloria looked away from them, her eyes on something off screen.
“We were sleeping together by then. I didn’t want to. I’m not saying he forced me—not really,” said Gloria, and Robin thought of Shifty’s PA, Gemma, “but keeping him happy was the only way to keep going. Otherwise there’d be a slap or worse. One time, he made some comment about hurting my grandmother if I didn’t behave. I went crazy at him, and he laughed, and said it was an obvious joke, but he wanted to plant the idea in my mind, and he succeeded.
“And he didn’t believe in contraception. We were supposed to be using the… you know, the rhythm method,” said Gloria, reaching again for her wine. “But he was… let’s say, he was careless, and I was sure he wanted me pregnant, because then he’d have me cornered, and I’d marry him. My grandparents would probably have backed him up. They were devout people.
“So, without telling Luca, I went to Margot for the pill. She said she was happy to give it to me, but she didn’t know I had a boyfriend, even, I’d never said…
“And even though I didn’t really like her,” said Gloria, “I told her some of it. It was the only place I could drop the pretense, I suppose. I knew she couldn’t tell anyone outside her consulting room. She tried to talk sense into me. Tried to show me there were ways out of the situation, apart from just giving in to Luca all the time. I thought it was all right for her, with all her money and her big safe house…
“But she gave me a bit of hope, I suppose. Once, after he’d hit me, and told me I’d asked for it, and told me I should be grateful I had someone offering me a way out of living at home with two old people, I said, ‘There are other places I could go,’ and I think he got worried someone had offered to help me get away. I’d stopped making fun of Margot by this time, and Luca wasn’t a stupid man…
“That’s when he wrote her threatening notes. Anonymously, you know—but I knew it was him,” said Gloria. “I knew his writing. Dorothy was off one day because her son was having his tonsils out, so Irene was opening the post and she unfolded one of the notes, right at the desk beside me. She was gloating about it, and I had to pretend to find it funny, but not to recognize the handwriting.
“I confronted Luca about it. He told me not to be so stupid, of course he hadn’t written the notes, but I knew he had…
“Anyway—I think it was right after the second note—I found out what I’d been terrified about happening had happened. I was pregnant. I hadn’t realized that the pill wouldn’t work if you’d had a stomach upset, and I’d had a bug, a month before. I knew I was cornered, and it was too late, I’d have to marry Luca. The Riccis would want it, and my grandparents wouldn’t want me to be an unwed mother.
“That’s when I admitted it to myself for the first time,” said Gloria, looking directly at Strike and Robin. “I absolutely hated Luca Ricci.”
“Gloria,” said Robin quietly, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but could I ask you: when you were sick at Margot’s barbecue—?”
“You heard about that, did you? Yes, that was when I had the tummy bug. People said one of the kids had spiked the punch, but I don’t think so. Nobody else was as ill as I was.”
Out of the corner of Robin’s eye, she saw Strike writing something in his notebook.
“I went back to Margot to find out for sure whether I was pregnant,” said Gloria. “I knew I could trust her. I broke down again in her surgery, and cried my eyes out, when she confirmed it. And then… well, she was just lovely. She held my hand and talked to me for ages.
“I thought abortion was a sin,” said Gloria. “That’s the way I was raised. She didn’t think it was a sin, not Margot. She talked to me about the life I was likely to have with Luca, if I had the baby. We discussed me keeping it, alone, but we both knew Luca wouldn’t want that, that he’d be in my life forever if I had his kid. It was hard, then, being on your own with a child. I was watching Janice the nurse doing it. Always juggling her son and the job.
“I didn’t tell Luca, obviously,” said Gloria. “I knew that if I was going to—to do anything—I had to do it quickly, before he noticed my body change, but most of all, before the baby could feel it or…”
Gloria suddenly bowed her head, and covered her face with her hands.
“I’m so s
orry,” said Robin. “It must have been awful for you…”
“No—well—” said Gloria, straightening up and again pushing back her white hair, her eyes wet. “Never mind that. I’m only telling you, so you understand…
“Margot made the appointment for me. She gave the clinic her name and contact details and she bought us both wigs, because if she was recognized, someone might recognize me by association. And she came with me—it was a Saturday—to this place in Bride Street. I’ve never forgotten the name of the street, because a bride is exactly what I didn’t want to be, and that’s why I was there.
“The clinic had been using Margot’s name as the referring doctor, and I think somewhere there were crossed wires, because they thought ‘Margot Bamborough’ was the one having the procedure. Margot said, ‘It doesn’t matter, nobody’ll ever know, all these records are confidential.’ And she said, in a way it was convenient, if there was any follow-up needed, they could contact her and arrange it.
“She held my hand on the way in, and she was there when I woke up,” said Gloria, and now tears leaked from her dark eyes, and she brushed them quickly away. “When I was ready to go home, she took me to the end of my grandparents” street in a taxi. She told me what to do afterward, how to take care of myself…
“I wasn’t like Margot,” said Gloria, her voice breaking. “I didn’t believe it was right, what I did. September the fourteenth: I don’t think that date’s come by once, since, that I haven’t remembered, and thought about that baby.
“When I went back to work after a couple of days off, she took me into her office and asked me how I was feeling, and then she said, ‘Now, Gloria, you’ve got to be brave. If you stay with Luca, this will happen again.’ She said, ‘We need to find you a job away from London, and make sure he doesn’t know where you’ve gone.’ And she said something that’s stayed with me always, ‘We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.’
“But I wasn’t like Margot,” said Gloria again. “I wasn’t brave, I couldn’t imagine leaving my grandparents. I pretended to agree, but ten days after the abortion I was sleeping with Luca again, not because I wanted to, but because there didn’t seem any other choice.
“And then,” said Gloria, “about a month after we’d been to the clinic, it happened. Margot disappeared.”
A muffled male voice was now heard at Gloria’s end of the call. She turned toward the door behind her and said,
“Non, c’est toujours en cours!”
Turning back to her computer she said,
“Pardon. I mean, sorry.”
“Mrs. Jaubert—Gloria,” said Strike, “could we please take you back through the day Margot disappeared?”
“The whole day?”
Strike nodded. Gloria took a slow inward breath, like somebody about to dive into deep water, then said,
“Well, the morning was all normal. Everyone was there except Wilma the cleaner. She didn’t come in on Fridays.
“I remember two things about the morning: meeting Janice by the kettle at the back, and her going on about the sequel to The Godfather coming out soon, and me pretending to be excited about it, and actually feeling as though I’d run a mile rather than go and see it… and Irene being quite smug and pleased because Janice had just been on a date with some man she’d been trying to set Janice up with for ages.
“Irene was funny about Janice,” said Gloria. “They were supposed to be such great friends, but she was always going on about Janice being a bit of a man-eater, which was funny if you’d known Irene. She used to say that Janice needed to learn to cut her cloth, that she was deluded, waiting for someone like James Caan to show up and sweep her off her feet, because she was a single mother and not that great a catch. Irene thought the best she could hope for was this man from Eddie’s work, who sounded a bit simple. Irene was always laughing about him getting things wrong…
“We were quite busy, as I remember it, all three doctors coming in and out of the waiting room to call for their patients. I can’t remember anything unusual about the afternoon except that Irene left early. She claimed she had toothache, but I thought it was a fib at the time. She hadn’t seemed in pain to me, when she was going on about Janice’s love life.
“I knew Margot was meeting her friend later in the pub. She told me, because she had a doughnut in cling film in the fridge, and she asked me to bring it through to her, right before she saw her last patient, to keep her going. She loved sugar. She was always in the biscuit tin at five o’clock. She had one of those metabolisms, never put on weight, full of nervous energy.
“I remember the doughnut, because when I took it in to her, I said, ‘Why didn’t you just eat those chocolates?’ She had a box she’d taken out of the bin, I think it was the day before. I mean, they were still in their cellophane when she took them out of the bin, it wasn’t unhygienic. Someone had sent them to her—”
“Someone?” repeated Strike.
“Well, we all thought it was that patient the police were so interested in, Steve Douthwaite,” said Gloria. “Dorothy thought that, anyway.”
“Wasn’t there a message attached?”
“There was a card saying ‘Thank you,’” said Gloria, “and Dorothy might’ve made the assumption it was Steve Douthwaite, because we all thought he was turning up a lot. I don’t think the card was signed, though.”
“So Margot threw the box in the bin, and then took it out again, afterward?”
“Yes, because I laughed at her about it,” said Gloria. “I said, ‘I knew you couldn’t resist,’ and she laughed, too. And next day, when I said, ‘Why don’t you eat them?’ she said, ‘I have, I’ve finished them.’”
“But she still had the box there?”
“Yes, on the shelf with her books. I went back to the front desk. Dr. Brenner’s patient left, but Brenner didn’t, because he was writing up the notes.”
“Could I ask you whether you knew about Dr. Brenner’s barbiturate addiction?” asked Strike.
“His what?” said Gloria.
“Nobody ever told you about that?”
“No,” she said, looking surprised. “I had no idea.”
“You never heard that Janice had found an Amytal capsule in the bottom of a cup of tea?”
“No… oh. Is that why Margot started making her own tea? She told me Irene made it too milky.”
“Let’s go back to the order in which everyone left.”
“OK, so, Dr. Gupta’s patient was next, and Dr. Gupta left immediately afterward. He had some family dinner he needed to attend, so off he went.
“And then, just when I was thinking we were done for the day, in walked that girl, Theo.”
“Tell us about Theo,” said Strike.
“Long black hair… dark-skinned. She looked Romanian or Turkish. Ornate earrings, you know: gypsy-ish. I actually thought she looked like a gypsy. I’d never seen her before, so I knew she wasn’t registered with us. She looked as though she was in a lot of pain, with her stomach. She came up to the desk and asked to see a doctor urgently. I asked her name, and she said Theo… something or other. I didn’t ask her again because she was obviously suffering, so I told her to wait and went to see whether a doctor was free. Margot’s door was still closed, so I asked Dr. Brenner. He didn’t want to see her. He was always like that, always difficult. I never liked him.
“Then Margot’s door opened, and the mother and child who’d been seeing her left, and she said she’d see the girl who was waiting.”
“And Theo was definitely a girl?” asked Strike.
“Without any doubt at all,” said Gloria firmly. “She was broad-shouldered, I noticed that when she came to the desk, but she was definitely a woman. Maybe it was the shoulders that made Dr. Brenner say, afterward, she looked like a man, but honestly…
“I was thinking about him last night, knowing I was going to be talking to you. Brenner was probably the biggest misogynist I ever met. He’d denigrate women fo
r not looking feminine or talking ‘like a lady,’ but he also despised Irene, who was giggly and blonde and very feminine, you know. I suppose what he wanted was for us all to be like Dorothy, subordinate and respectful, high collars, low hemlines. Dorothy was like a really humorless nun.”
Robin thought of Betty Fuller, lying on a bed, pretending to be comatose, while Brenner poured filthy words into her ear.
“Women patients really didn’t like Brenner. We were always having them asking to switch to Margot, but we had to turn most of them down, because her list was so full. But Brenner was coming up for retirement and we were hoping we’d get someone better when he went.
“So, yes, he left, and Theo went in to see Margot. I kept checking the time, because I was supposed to be meeting Luca, and if I kept him waiting, there was always trouble. But Theo’s appointment just went on and on. At a quarter past six, Theo finally came back out of the surgery and left.
“Margot came through just a couple of minutes later. She seemed absolutely exhausted. It had been a full day. She said, ‘I’m going to write her notes up tomorrow, I’ve got to go, Oonagh’s waiting. Lock up with the spare key.’ I didn’t really answer,” said Gloria, “because I was so worried about Luca getting angry with me. So, I never said goodbye, or have a good evening, to this woman who saved my life…
“Because she did, you know. I never said it to her, but she did…”
A tear trickled down her face. Gloria paused to wipe it away, then said,
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