‘Monty!’ George stared blankly at the speckled mirror over the phone, into which the local Toms had stuck their phone numbers on little printed cards. She didn’t see them; all she could see was Monty’s pallid face and piggy white-lashed eyes. Monty? Could he be the man behind all that had happened? Could it be he who – She shook her head as Mike’s voice sounded tinnily in her ear.
‘Dr B.? Are you there, Dr B.? Are you still there?’
‘Mmm, yes. I’m here. Are you suggesting that – Oh, no, Mike, I don’t think so.’
But even as she said it, her mind was whirling, fitting Monty’s name into the blanks in her Connections, seeing him helping Philip kill the women. But if Monty helped Philip, what happened to Philip’s motive? She had imagined him getting involved in the killing of his damaged patients as a way of keeping the truth from his family. If the family already knew, then why –
‘Money,’ she said aloud. To avoid the damages the court would award the women and to let him stay on in practice. He’d be struck off if he lost his case, and lose it he would. The motive’s still there. And it’s a motive for Monty too, who would probably have to pay the bills. ‘Money,’ she said again.
Mike’s voice sounded more distant now. ‘I can barely hear you, Dr B. This line’s awful. What did you say?’
‘It’s not important Mike,’ she shouted. ‘Look, get your train, come back to London and see if you can find Lenny round the betting shops or whatever. I’ve an idea of my own to follow up. I’ll call you again first chance I get, OK?’
‘What?’ he said but she didn’t repeat it or say anything else. There didn’t seem any point; if she told him what she planned to do, he’d get agitated over the risks she’d be taking. Well, she’d been agitated herself, but she had to live with that. There was no other way now but to take the chance.
The house was like all the others in the long handsome street; it had two or three steps up from the railings, a heavy front door painted in high gloss with a multiplicity of brass plates on it, and discreetly shrouded windows. She wondered idly, as she waited for a party of Arab women in full Middle Eastern dress, complete with face-masks which made them look like little beaked birds, to pack themselves into a large car ready to be driven off, thus releasing a parking space for her, what would happen if all the brass-plate owners turned up in the street on the same day. They’d have to set up their consultations in the corridors, the back gardens and the street itself. Her imagination conjured up a picture of desks and couches on every pavement, at which serious faced doctors plied their trade as taxis and vans inched past. And she was grimly amused. What these people were doing, she told herself rather self-righteously, was indeed acting as tradesmen rather than as real doctors of the sort she admired. Well, not all of them, she allowed, as at last the car, a very elderly and capacious Bentley, pulled its stately way out of the parking bay; some of the consultants at Old East have rooms here once or twice a week, and there are some pretty good doctors among them. But there are too many of the other kind, the Philip Cobbett kind, the so-called alternative kind, who have more hype than real experience to offer. They were the sort she despised.
It was as she locked the car and turned to walk along the pavement to the house where Philip had his rooms that she realized what she was doing in thinking so. Filling her mind with thoughts about the rights and wrongs of private Harley Street practice, instead of thinking of how the coming interview might go, was a ploy. She shouldn’t be here alone, that was the truth of it. It was asking for trouble, not least of which would be Gus’s rage. It was her own impatience that was driving her; that and the thought of Gus facing the discipline board at Tintagel House to hear whether they believed the evidence of his own past history as a superb policeman or the uncorroborated testimony of a much less senior officer. Gus getting the third degree, she thought, and blinked. ‘Like the burned women,’ she murmured aloud and then tightened her lips. This had to stop! She must concentrate on what she was here to do. She hurried on to the house where Cobbett had his rooms.
She paused on the top step, staring at Philip’s plate. Philip Cobbett, it read. MB, BSc, LRCP, LRCS. It looked good, she imagined, to lay people who would assume these were high qualifications and didn’t know they were in fact only the most basic, the ones you started out with after you trained in an English medical school. She thought of her own string of letters, and most particularly of her FRC Path, the Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists which she’d worked so hard to earn, and smiled grimly. Would young Cobbett have been able to do as well? Had he even tried to gain further and more important qualifications?
‘I don’t have to be scared of him,’ she whispered as she reached forward and pressed the brass bell. ‘It’s broad daylight, a busy house in a busy street. He can’t harm me.’
The girl who answered the door looked, George thought, like an advertisement in an American magazine for haemorrhoid cream. She was wearing the crispest of white dresses, very snug about the waist and bust, white shoes and tights, and had a scrap of lace and starch perched on her carefully arranged blonde curls. She was blue-eyed, had a tip-tilted nose (though whether by birth or intervention George could not at this point be sure) and looked exactly as George supposed Philip Cobbett’s patients wanted themselves to look. Certainly she bore little resemblance to the nurses George knew at Old East in their somewhat crumpled blue dresses, hardworn black shoes and tights, and capless heads. That’s how real nurses look, she thought as she nodded at the girl and stepped inside the house, not waiting for an invitation. Not like this kewpie doll.
‘Mr Cobbett,’ she said. ‘Please tell him Dr Barnabas is here.’
‘Oh,’ the girl said. ‘Um – do you have an appointment?’
George contrived to look lofty and amused at the same time. ‘Didn’t you hear, my dear? I’m Doctor Barnabas.’ Here’s hoping she takes that seriously, George thought, and doesn’t come on like a dragon guarding a gate.
She didn’t. She just said, ‘Oh!’ looking somewhat flummoxed, and then turned and went away, leaving George standing in the hallway. It was big and bright and heavily scented with floor polish and flowers and just a hint of old-fashioned antiseptic. Clever, George thought. They’ve made it smell both welcoming and reassuringly hospitally. Salesmanship, or accident? She suspected the former.
The girl had vanished behind the white-painted staircase at the end of the hallway, and George lifted her head to listen. Silence. No distant voices, no phones ringing, no lifts rattling. A quiet time in the house. No patients? She moved forwards a little gingerly, pushed open a door on the right-hand side and looked in. She heard Maureen’s voice in her ears. The waiting room’s really gorgeous. You ought to see it.
Wow, she thought. The walls had been clad in peach fabric and she reached out to touch. Wild silk, she thought. The windows had been shrouded in layers of peach-coloured net and everywhere there were mirrors, softly lit, again with peach lights. Even the furniture was mirrored; the huge centre table, which was laden with more of the books George had seen at Maureen’s shop as well as piles of glossy magazines all reflected in the glitter, and the scatter of small tables that were set everywhere. There were sofas and armchairs too, upholstered in deep peach velvet and trimmed with gold braid. The floor was the same colour in a deeper tone, with carpet which looked to George to be inches thick. The whole place breathed extravagance and chill. Not physical cold; in the white marble fireplace that dominated the far wall piles of imitation logs flamed and hissed, even on this summer day, and there were discreet radiators everywhere. It was the fact that the room felt as though it was largely unused that gave it its sense of chill.
She had moved further into the room to look about, and was startled when the voice spoke behind her.
‘Dr Barnabas?’
‘Oh! Yes. Hello, I do hope you remember me?’
‘Er, yes, of course.’ He was watchful. His pale face looked even paler beneath the smooth fair hair and his eyes gave
nothing away.
‘At your uncle’s house?’
He said nothing, just looked at her with brows raised in a question.
‘Well,’ she said and managed to let her shoulders relax so that she seemed at ease with him. It was far from easy to do. ‘I do hope you don’t mind me just turning up like this. Perhaps I should have phoned and asked to come and see you.’
He was staring at her still with those expressionless eyes, but now he seemed to reach a decision. He smiled. It made George’s shoulders tighten again for a moment; it was so tense a grimace that it looked as though it hurt him. Still, it was meant to be a smile. ‘Are you consulting me as a – as a doctor, or as a –’
She laughed then, making the most of it as a chance to ease her own tense muscles. ‘Oh, not as a patient! I doubt you could do anything for me! Past redemption, I am.’ And she found herself thinking, shut up! That’s the most blatant of fishing trips. You should be ashamed of yourself.
He opened his mouth to respond, but she hurried on. ‘No, it’s purely professional.’ She reached into her bag, which was looped over her shoulder, and, with her head bent, as though she were concentrating on finding the relevant page in the notebook she pulled out of it, said, ‘I’ve been doing some checks on a couple of my jobs, and I thought you might be able to help.’
‘Oh?’ He looked at her more warily now. ‘But I thought you – I mean, what’s your – You’re at Old East?’
‘Well, now,’ she said. ‘How do you know that? I don’t remember it being mentioned when we were introduced.’
‘It wasn’t,’ he said. ‘My aunt told me. She said you, er, have been very kind to her.’
‘It’s a pleasure to help someone so energetic and lively,’ George said and smiled at him. Was it possible to make this man relax? He stood there woodenly, looking old, somehow. He couldn’t be much more than thirty or so, yet standing there in that stuffy dark suit and with his fair hair so carefully smoothed over above that bony pale face, he could have been half as much again. ‘I like your aunt a lot. There aren’t enough Maureen Ledbetters in this world.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There aren’t.’ For the first time he seemed to relax a little and she pushed her advantage.
‘Well, she’s right, of course. I am at Old East. Did she tell you my job there?’
‘Er, no. I don’t think so.’
‘Pathologist,’ she said, watching him. He stared back, as still as ever. More still? More watchful? It was hard to be sure.
‘It’s a couple of my cases that I need your help with, Philip,’ she went on easily. ‘Perhaps we could go to your consulting room? You’ll need to look at your records, I imagine, and anyone might walk in here at any moment.’
‘I have no immediate appointments due,’ he said. ‘And as for my records, I have an excellent memory for my patients.’
Poor bastard, George thought, feeling, in spite of her conviction of his guilt, the doctors’ camaraderie as she looked at him standing there beside the big mirrored table with his reflection peering up at him from its gleaming surface. I don’t suppose he’s had enough to forget any of them.
‘Oh, well, fine then.’ She looked down at her notebook again, but only briefly. She needed to watch his reactions. ‘I have some path. work to add to their notes and I’ve been having some trouble tracing them. It seems they’ve both been patients of yours as well as Old East’s, and I thought it might be of value to collate the records.’
If he believes that, the man’s a fool,’ she said to herself. Private and NHS records don’t have to be collated, but he’s so inexperienced, I doubt he’d know that.
‘Well, if you’ll tell me their names,’ Philip said, and stood there waiting, his face as impassive as ever. She took a breath.
‘Lisa Zizi and Shirley Candrell,’ she said, fast and loud, and never took her eyes from him.
He stood there for a moment and then slowly shook his head. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Those two. Poor things. What’s happened to them now?’
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She gaped, unable to speak for a moment, and he peered at her in the warm peach light and said, ‘Dr Barnabas? Has something happened to those two? Or have they sorted it all out?’
She swallowed and managed to answer him, though her mouth was dry. ‘I – actually they – they’re dead.’
She hadn’t meant to be so direct, but his reaction had so stunned her that she’d lost control of the situation. Now it was his turn to be startled.
‘Dead? Both of them? Good God, why? What happened? Young women, both of them. Dead? It must have been –’
‘Fire. They died in fires,’ George said. She shook her head, as if that would clear it. ‘Look, would you mind explaining how you know them?’
‘With pleasure,’ he said, and put out one hand towards her. He seemed much more relaxed now, as though her reaction had melted the frost with which he had protected himself. ‘Look, shall we sit down? I’d take you to my consulting room but, to tell the truth, I’ve had so few appointments lately that I’ve sort of sublet it for a while to – um – a colleague. It all helps with the rent, you know, and – well, I can only see you in here.’
He was disarming in his little burst of honesty, and she began to feel more comfortable with him. ‘Yes,’ she said, and managed a smile. ‘Of course.’ She sat down with a little thump in one of the armchairs. He came and perched his rump on the table in front of her, folding his hands across his front as he contemplated her with that same flat, watchful expression on his face. Clearly it was natural to him and meant nothing special, she found herself thinking.
‘Lisa and Shirley,’ he said. ‘I think they’re – this is as between clinicians, of course, confidential – I think they’re – they were prostitutes, you know.’
‘Really,’ she managed weakly. ‘What makes you say that?’
He looked uncomfortable for a moment and then shrugged. ’Oh, I don’t know. There was something about them both. A sort of way of talking. And sitting and moving. Studied, you know. Anyway, they’d been treated by a real quack – one of those collagen-injecting places. A friend had paid for them, they said. They didn’t come to see me together, you understand, but they knew each other and had had the same experience. The first one I saw was Shirley. She told me what had happened. She turned up here in dark glasses and a scarf – you should have seen what those botchers had done! They’d tried to fill out the eyebags and the mouth lines with some sort of synthetic stuff and the mess was dreadful. Lumpy, discoloured skin where the material had leached through, a drooping mouth due to nerve compression. Shocking. I told her frankly she needed someone much more skilled than I am. I’ve not been doing this sort of work long and to tell the truth I’m strongly considering abandoning it altogether. It’s not for me. I find skins much more interesting. Much. And more worthwhile. To deal with melanoma for example, that’s real medicine, isn’t it? Not like this vanity business. Anyway, I referred her on. And then the other one came a couple of days later. Zizi, odd name. Yes. Lisa Zizi. She told me a friend had suggested she come to me, and I told her the same thing. Her face wasn’t quite so bad, but it wasn’t a case I would have touched myself. So I referred her on too. And that was the last I saw of either of them. And now you tell me they’re dead? In a fire? Poor things.’
‘In separate fires,’ George said steadily. ‘Fires that seem centred on their faces.’
He frowned, and the watchful look deepened. ‘Separate fires? Their faces? Are you saying … Good God! Deliberately?’
‘Something like that,’ she said. And then added in a loud clear voice, ‘I thought you might have had something to do with the fires.’
‘I?’ He gawped. ‘I? How could I – Oh!’ He went a sudden crimson as the tide of realization lifted through his pale skin and now at last he looked the very young man he was. ‘Christ almighty, me? But how? I mean, why? For heaven’s sake how could I –’ He spluttered to an end and just sat there, staring at her.
&nbs
p; ‘I worked out that you must have seen them,’ she said. ‘Your uncle knows everyone locally. Both these women lived in Wapping. And if someone on his patch needed plastic surgery advice who would they go to but you? He’d see to that.’
‘Yes,’ Philip said with a sharp note in his voice. ‘I can’t deny that. Dammit, this is embarrassing. All right, I let him set me up here in practice, even though I knew bloody well it wasn’t for me. I’m nowhere near qualified enough. I did a couple of house jobs in facial reconstruction and so forth, but that wasn’t enough. But Uncle Monty – he’s a force of Nature, you know? Hard to say no to. I happened to say plastic surgery had interested me, and there was no stopping him. But I’m sorting it out now. I’ve been talking to the people at the Institute of Dermatology. I’ll change the practice, build it myself and he’ll settle down. He’ll have to. I can’t take much more of his – Well, he’s a good old man but he really can’t run my life.’ He shook his head and primmed his mouth and was silent.
‘I think I understand,’ she said. ‘Look, let’s get this sorted out. I’m right then, and he arranged for you to see them?’
‘Yes.’
‘After they’d been treated at a clinic somewhere?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which one? Where?’
He shook his head. ‘I did ask them but they said it was a condition put on them both not to make a complaint.’
‘A condition?’
‘I had the impression their fees were being paid by someone else,’ he said. ‘They certainly weren’t on BUPA or anything of that sort.’
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