“I think his behavior has something to do with his aura,” I said, half to myself.
Anita cut me off. “We don’t have time for that right now.”
I stood up, hoping I’d feel more authoritative than when I was sitting down.
“Just listen. You’re telling me that Dr. Reid is acting out of character, meeting late at night with someone he’d normally go out of his way to avoid. I’m telling you that Dr. Reid has an aura, which predicts his death in some form or another, and possibly quite soon. There has to be a connection. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise.”
For the first time in the eight years I’d known Anita, she didn’t answer back.
“Anita? Are you all right?”
“There’s something else,” she said, and her voice was shaky. “I’m probably imagining it, but I felt sure I was being followed on my way home just now.”
My mouth went dry. Anita wasn’t prone to vivid imaginings and had never admitted to being scared of anything. When we’d shared the studio in a seedy area of London, she’d always carried a switchblade and a can of pepper spray in her purse. On at least two occasions she’d frightened muggers away. She was everything I wasn’t; calm, centered, self-confident and fearless, while I carried my own insecurities and fears around like a backpack full of rocks.
“Did you see who was following you?” I asked.
“No. I didn’t notice anything unusual on the bus. It was when I was walking from the bus-stop to my flat that I realized there was someone behind me. It was dark and I couldn’t see much. But I heard footsteps and they slowed when I did and sped up when I began walking more quickly. When I got to the house, I had my keys ready and ran inside and locked the door. I’ve been looking out of the windows but I can’t see anyone.”
“Maybe it was nothing,” I said, wanting to calm her. “You’re upset about Dr. Reid and perhaps a little shaken. It’s easy to imagine the worst at a time like that.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right. I’m sorry. This whole thing at work has got me unsettled. And…” she paused. “The aura thing too. I can’t get it out of my mind. Any of it. That you can see them and that Dr. Reid has one. It’s crazy, but what if you’re right?”
Sighing, I flipped the switch on the kettle to make a second cup of tea. Insisting that I was right was not going to make Anita feel any better, but if there were any chance of helping Dr. Reid, I needed her to believe me.
“I wish it weren’t so, Anita, but Dr. Reid does have an aura and it’s pronounced enough to mean that death is imminent. We need to work out what to do to help him.”
“We?”
“Well, I’ll need your help, as I don’t know him at all.”
“But why would you care? As you say, you don’t even know him.”
“But I care about you and you care about him.” I poured water on to a fresh teabag and took a sip. It was scalding and burnt my tongue. “I’ve seen hundreds of auras in the last year,” I continued. “Nearly all of them over strangers, people I couldn’t help even if I wanted to. Others over people I’ve had some kind of connection with.”
“You told me about Aidan,” said Anita.
“Yes, and others too, people I knew. I did what I could but sometimes…” I trailed off, realizing that this wasn’t what Anita needed to hear. Carrying the phone and tea to my room, I slipped into bed and pulled the comforter up around me. I’d often talked to Anita like this. We’d had long conversations late into the night when we’d first started working and didn’t have time to see each other during the day.
“Let’s assume for a minute that you were being followed,” I continued. “Why? Something to do with whatever is going on with Dr. Reid perhaps?”
Anita was silent for a few seconds. “I can’t see any connection,” she said finally.
“Do you want to come over and stay? We could talk it through.”
“Thanks, but I’d rather stay home now I’m here. The doors are locked. I don’t usually freak out, you know that, but…”
I’d run out of ideas, other than feeling that Eric Hill had something to do with Reid’s aura. But I didn’t have enough information to work out why or what to do about it.
“I’m knackered,” Anita said. “I’m going to catch up on some sleep. My first patient appointment is scheduled for 8 a.m. Thanks for listening to me. Let’s talk again tomorrow.”
“As long as you’re certain you’ll be all right? Let me know if anything unusual happens at work, do you promise? I’ll think about it some more.”
I meant to keep my word and do some serious thinking but, after the late nights finishing up my projects, I was tired. Even so, when I turned off the lamp, Anita’s fears of being followed brought back painful memories of the man who’d attacked me in my hallway and I switched the light back on. When I finally fell asleep, I had nightmares of killers in the dark, of doors that wouldn’t lock, and of crimson blood pooling on white carpets.
8
My head ached when I woke the next morning. I felt as though I’d barely slept. My first thought was about Anita. I texted her and she responded at once to say she was all right and on her way to work. After a quick breakfast of tea and toast, I emailed my assignment to the editor of the gardening magazine, hitting the send button with a sense of relief that it was done on time. Now I could focus on my aura issues.
Waiting for the kettle to boil for more tea, I gazed out of the window. Rain streamed down the glass, obscuring the view beyond. It was like looking at an aura, everything behind it blurred and hazy.
I took my cup of tea to the den, thinking about Dr. Reid and Simon Scott. I felt like beating my head against the desk. I knew something bad was going to happen to both of them and I couldn’t think of a single thing that might stop it. My eyes drifted to my mobile. Calling Eliza Chapman again was probably a waste of time but I did it anyway. To my surprise, she answered. I’d prepared what I was going to say and quickly introduced myself.
“Colin Butler suggested I get in touch with you,” I finished.
“Ah, Colin,” she said. “And why didn’t the great journalist contact me himself?”
“He’s tied up with something,” I said. “He sends his apologies but said to let you know he trusts me to talk with you.” I cringed as I embellished the facts, but now I had her on the phone I was anxious to make sure she’d see me.
“All right,” she said. Her voice had the raspy timbre of a long-time smoker. She gave me an address in Cambridge and suggested I go up that afternoon. I hesitated very briefly. The trip would take several hours, but she was my best link to Simon Scott.
A couple of hours later, I was on the train, zipping through the northern London suburbs. Soon we were out in the countryside, passing through fields of dark soil and stands of bare-branched trees under ashen skies.
After buying a cup of tea from the refreshments cart, I used my mobile to do some preliminary research on the woman I was going to interview. Her name had been in the papers a couple of years previously for giving the wrong treatment to a child, which resulted in the suspension of her medical license. That was interesting. I couldn’t wait to meet her. When we reached the station, I grabbed a taxi and soon stood at the door of her shabby semidetached house.
Eliza Chapman had to be in her late forties, about the same age as Simon Scott, but she looked ten years older. Shoulders slumped under a frayed brown cardigan. Her shoulder-length graying hair was brittle, in need of a conditioner and a good cut, and her face had those deep wrinkles typically incised through years of smoke and alcohol. An overweight tabby cat wound itself around her ankles until she gave it a gentle shove with her foot, causing it to mew loudly and run off down the hall.
She led me into a small living room that was sparsely furnished, but crowded with books. Shelves along one wall sagged under the weight of them and a stack of hardbacks substituted for a missing leg of the coffee table. The table’s surface was littered with volumes of different colors and sizes, topp
ed with an empty wine glass. She picked up several magazines from the couch and patted the cushion into shape, sending up a cloud of dust.
“Tea?” she asked. “Or a glass of wine?”
“Tea, please, if that’s not too much trouble?”
“Come with me then and we can talk while I make it.”
I followed her down the narrow hallway to the kitchen. It was cleaner than I’d expected, and compact, with appliances lined up along one wall under a row of white laminate cabinets. Most of the doors were chipped on the corners, the fiberboard underneath showing through. After filling the kettle, Eliza took some teabags from a metal canister with a picture of a cat on it and put them in a brown teapot that didn’t appear to have a lid.
“So, tell me again why the mighty Colin didn’t come here himself?” she asked. The smell of stale smoke hung around her like a shroud.
“Do you know Colin personally?” I asked, confused. I knew he’d written an article about her, but she spoke of him more as though she knew him well. He’d mentioned that there was some history now I came to think of it, but he hadn’t elucidated. Then again he hadn’t really explained anything much.
“He didn’t tell you how we met?”
I shrugged.
“He’s a friend of my sister’s. I met him ages ago when my sister was trying her hand at match-making. That was a big waste of time. The men she thought I’d be interested in, oh my God. Anyway, Colin was one of them and we liked each other well enough, I suppose, but not like that. I hadn’t seen him for years before the scandal erupted. Then he turned up and offered to write my side of the story. I think my sister begged him to do it.”
“The scandal being the issue with the vaccination?”
Eliza sighed. “Yes, of course. That scandal.”
She poured tea and milk into a couple of beige earthenware mugs and handed me one. “Let’s go sit down,” she said.
I sat on the dusty couch, while she settled into a brown velour armchair that looked like a dog with mange, mottled with worn shiny patches and unidentifiable stains.
“Do you mind?” I asked, putting my mobile on top of a book on the coffee table. “If I can record our conversation, I won’t need to take notes.”
She shrugged. “Okay.” She was tapping a fingernail against her mug. I thought she seemed nervous, so I tried to ease into a conversation.
“You have a lot of books. You must collect them.”
“Obviously.”
“Any particular genre?”
“Not really. A lot of them are medical books, boring as hell.” She pointed to the bookshelf. “But those are my favorites; poetry, novels, short stories. I can’t stand watching television, so I read instead.”
I nodded. “I don’t like television either.”
She didn’t respond. Eager to begin the interview, I checked the recorder was working and leaned back against the lumpy sofa cushion.
“Why don’t we just start with what it is that you wanted to tell Colin Butler?”
“There are some things about Simon Scott,” she said. “Things that people should know before they decide to vote for him.”
I waited but she didn’t say anything else.
“Can you tell me about them?”
“Of course. That’s why I invited you to come. But you will publish what I tell you, won’t you? I want this to be in the paper so everyone can read it.”
Although she had the impression that I worked for Colin’s newspaper, this didn’t seem like the time to clarify the situation. “All I can do is take notes,” I said. “The editor decides if and when to publish. But I have a question for you. Why aren’t you talking to the tabloids? They’d love to get their hands on rumors about Scott. You’d be sure of widespread coverage that way.”
“I’m not telling you rumors,” Eliza snapped. “I’m telling you the absolute truth. And I hate the tabloids, almost as much as I detest Simon Scott. You know what they did to me.”
“I saw the stories from a couple of years ago, yes,” I said.
“So you must see why I don’t want to talk to any of those scumbags.” She drank some tea and grimaced. I sipped at mine and it tasted fine.
“Why don’t you give me a quick rundown on everything leading up to this moment?” I asked. “It’s best if I hear it from you directly.”
She sighed. She seemed to do that a lot. “Let’s start at the beginning then, as it will make more sense that way. Scott and I were at Cambridge together, medical students. Scott was one of those golden boys, good-looking, smart, popular. You know the type.” She paused and peered at me. “Or maybe you don’t. You’re not Oxbridge, are you. Let me guess. One of the modern places in the Home Counties?”
Stung, I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. “University College London, actually.”
“Oh, well, good for you,” she replied. I was stunned at the way she threw her prejudices around so casually, but she either didn’t notice my reaction or didn’t care.
“Anyway,” she continued. “Simon was one of those. Everyone liked him. I wasn’t in his league in terms of looks and popularity, but we were in the same classes and became friends. Turned out that our fathers knew each other vaguely as they both worked in Whitehall.”
She stopped when the previously shunned cat jumped on to her lap. She let it settle in before going on. “In our final year, Simon offered to proof-read a paper for me. It was really important, so I was thrilled that he was willing to help. I wasn’t quite so happy when he pointed out what he called some specious arguments. But I knew he was right, so I made the revisions he’d suggested. That took a couple of weeks. Not long after handing it in, my professor called me to his office. He accused me of cheating.”
Eliza’s hand started shaking. She slammed her mug down on the rickety table, which trembled under the onslaught. “Cheating. Can you believe it? He said my paper was almost a copy, and not a very good one at that, of a thesis submitted the previous week by Scott. I was given a fail and that meant a couple of residency positions I’d applied for were revoked.”
She stood up suddenly, and the cat adroitly jumped to the back of the chair, where it perched with its tail bushed out in annoyance. “I’ll be back,” she said.
Alone, I checked that my recording app was still working. It was, but I considered turning it off. Everything Eliza had said sounded like the rantings of a failed scholar. This trip was beginning to feel like a waste of time.
She came back with a glass of red wine in her hand and settled back into the chair. “Want one?” she asked lifting the glass up. I shook my head.
I really didn’t want to hear any more of her ramblings. The story was pathetic. A plagiarized paper from twenty-five years ago was hardly likely to deal a fatal blow to Scott’s political ambitions.
“I’m not sure I see where this is going,” I said. “Some academic cheating, even if it happened—”
“It did happen,” she said. “But that’s not the point. I told you about it to explain why I dislike Scott so much. And it illustrates his character, not that people seem to care much about character nowadays. They only care that whoever is in power promises to cut taxes and the price of petrol.”
I didn’t want to get drawn into a discussion about politics so I asked her what had happened after the debacle with her final paper.
“I couldn’t get into the cardiology residency program I was trying for,” she replied. “I ended up being a general practitioner.” She made it sound as though she’d become a child molester.
“Family care is very important,” I said. “Think of all the people you’ve looked after. I’d think that would be a wonderful way to practice medicine.”
She threw me a look of utter disdain. “Try it,” she said. “Snotty-nosed kids, obese mothers, rashes, coughs, sprained wrists. It’s not the stuff of dreams for someone who wanted to save lives in a cardiac unit.”
I shifted on the scarred sofa. Her self-pity grated on me. “I’m sure you could have wo
rked your way into a cardiology program if you cared that much about it,” I said, then tried to soften my words. “I mean, there must be ways to do that?”
She shrugged, the movement causing wine to splash out of her glass and on to the brown velour. She didn’t seem to notice. We were losing direction.
“So—?” I prompted.
“Two years ago, I made a mistake. I gave a kid the wrong dose of a vaccine and it made him sick. Not dangerously ill, but the parents complained and the press got hold of it. Within a day, I was splashed all over the papers, made to look like a monster. They said I was a drunk and unfit to practice. I was fired, my license was taken away. That’s why I hate the tabloids. The only newspaper that gave me a fair trial was Colin Butler’s. He wrote a piece about the pressure of overworked family doctors. He stood up for me. So I want him to handle this story because I trust him to do it properly. Otherwise it will be a twenty-four hour extravaganza of tabloid sleaze that no one with any intelligence will read.”
A little shocked, both by her story and her tone, I pressed on, anxious to finish the interview and start the journey home. Self-pity is corrosive and Eliza was swimming in a deep pool of it. It was her own life she was destroying. No one else was doing it for her.
“So, is there more?” I asked.
“Yes and this is the important part.” She drained the last of her wine, but gripped the stem of the glass as tightly as a lifeline. The cat remained on the back of the chair, making her look like a witch with a demon on her shoulder. “Simon fell in love with a Greek girl, another medical student who was one year below us. Her name was Phoena Stamos. She was beautiful, exotic, and brilliant. From what I heard, her family had made big sacrifices to make it possible for her to come to Cambridge. She and Simon made a stunning couple. But when his family heard about her they told him to finish the relationship. They had someone far more suitable in mind apparently, a woman called Tiffany Holden, whose father was a Member of Parliament.
“I think Simon resisted for a while, during which time, Phoena got pregnant. At that point, Scott senior was so angry he was threatening to pull Simon out of college. Simon gave Phoena money for an abortion and that was the end of it. I know that Simon, against his father’s wishes, offered to go with her to London for the procedure, but she refused. She didn’t return to Cambridge.”
The Complete Kate Benedict Cozy British Mysteries Page 31