‘Could your uncle have been paying for them?’ George said.
He looked amazed. ‘Why on earth should he?’
She thought for a while and then shook her head. ‘Frankly, I don’t know. I’m not sure of anything any more. I was sure you were involved, and now …’
‘Well, I’m not. And I’d be amazed if Uncle Monty were. He’s very good to his family, and very free with advice for outsiders, but he’s never splashed his money on anyone but his own kith and kin.’ He grinned briefly. ‘Your real Cockney, believe me.’
‘I have to,’ she said. ‘So, you referred Shirley and Lisa to another plastic surgeon.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they go to him?’
‘I’ve no idea. I heard no more.’ He slid from the table. ‘I suppose I could find out.’
‘Please do,’ she said. He nodded and went briskly out of the room, in search of a telephone, she assumed, and left her staring at the soft golden-pinky glow around her and trying to collect her confused thoughts.
The whole edifice of her theory had tumbled about her head, she thought mournfully. If neither Monty nor Philip were involved in the women’s deaths, who was, and why? And had they any connection with what had happened to Don and Lenny Greeson? And via them with Gus’s predicament? She no longer knew. In her mind she took the pages of her Connections chart and tore them into shreds.
He seemed a long time coming back and she began to be restless. She wandered out into the hall to see where he was, just as he reappeared from the space behind the stairs.
‘Oh,’ she said and went a little pink. ‘I was just –’
‘I’m sorry I took so long,’ he said. ‘I was just going to get you his phone number – it’s here’ – he held out a sheet of paper on which he’d written a name and address – ‘but I took a chance and phoned him. He was there. And he said he never saw them. Neither of them made an appointment with him.’
She frowned. ‘Never? I wonder why not? If they were so damaged that they came to see you, why didn’t they take the next step? What put them off?’
‘I can’t possibly know,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Could they have gone back to your uncle? Asked him about this chap you referred them to?’
He shook his head firmly. ‘No. He’d already asked me what had happened with them. I told him I had to refer them on – I said they needed a different sort of specialist. It’s easier to tell him lies than to make him understand my situation – and he was quite happy with that; as long as they’d been helped, and he’d been the first person they’d gone to, he was content. Never gave them another thought. Neither did I, till you came here today.’
She nodded and looked at the sheet of paper in her hand and then said, ‘When did they come to see you? Can you remember?’
‘Yes, I can.’ He looked embarrassed again. ‘I haven’t had that many referrals, you see. I saw Shirley Candrell on the morning of 21 June and Lisa Zizi a couple of days later, in the afternoon.’
She had been leafing through her notebook, but now her gaze sharpened as she looked up at him. ‘A couple of days? Can you be more specific?’
‘Um, yes. It would have been – let me see.’ He squinted into his memory. ‘It would have been the Thursday, 23 June. I remember because it was the day before my rent was due – I pay quarterly. And I knew I’d have to go to Uncle Monty again. I wasn’t feeling good about that, and here I was having to turn patients away because I couldn’t take their cases. That was really the point at which I knew it was all going to have to change. I’d been thinking of going to the States, but I knew then it had to be better than that, and got in touch with the Institute of Dermatology about more training. Oh, yes, I remember the date.’
She looked up at him, her forehead creased. ‘That was the night that the fire happened. The first one. The one that killed Lisa Zizi.’
There was a long silence as he looked at her and then he said in a tight voice, ‘I think I need to sit down.’
He led the way back into the waiting room, clearly very shaken. She stood beside him as he sat perched on the arm of one of his peach armchairs, and waited till he felt better.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a while, his voice a little husky. ‘It’s just that – God, I feel so responsible.’
‘That’s crazy!’ she said. ‘How can you possibly be responsible?’
‘If I’d been able to offer the right sort of help, maybe – As it was, I sent her on to someone else. She must have thought she was beyond help. People do strange things when they’re in despair.’
‘Suicide?’ She almost laughed. ‘Are you suggesting it was suicide? With that sort of method? Come on! You can’t be for real! I know doctors like to take on the responsibility for their patients, but this is way out of line!’
He looked up at her, his face bleak. ‘Do you really think so?’
‘I know so,’ she said firmly. ‘Both of them died in bed, lying still. They made no attempt to save themselves, even though the seat of the fire was their own bodies. It would have been impossible for anyone to have lain still enough to die like that unless they were heavily sedated. And they must have been. I did the post-mortems and couldn’t find any evidence of systemic drugs, though the bodies were so badly damaged there was no way I could have done. But believe me, someone did this to those two women. It was never self-inflicted. They were knocked out, somehow, and then were anointed with something flammable and –’
He went even more pale, so that his skin had a chalky greyness, and she pushed his head forwards and down so that he could recover.
‘Sorry to upset you with the details, but there it is. They didn’t kill themselves. Now, take a few deep breaths, that’s it. You’ll be OK in a moment.’
He was, and slowly straightened up. He still looked drawn, but his colour was a little better.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to be so – I’m really the last person who should be doing medicine, I can’t handle this sort of thing at all.’
‘And you with surgical ambitions,’ she said lightly, and he shook his head.
‘It’s my uncle who has those,’ he said with a return of his bitterness. ‘Well, he’ll have to settle for boasting about his nephew the skin man. Look, is there anything I can do to help you? I gather you’re trying to investigate these deaths? Do pathologists usually do that? I thought that after the medical examinations were over the police took charge.’
‘Um,’ she said. ‘Well, yes. They do. But I take a special interest, and anyway …’ She hesitated. She had been about to blurt out that it was because of Gus that she was taking a special interest in the dead women, but stopped herself in time. She barely knew the man and until a little while ago had been convinced he was a murderer. Though all he had said and done since had shown her that this was highly unlikely, there was always the possibility that she had been right the first time and that his reactions had been those not of an innocent man but of a brilliant and remarkably cool-headed actor. She looked at him now and tried to judge just how truthful he had been. All her instincts told her that he was incapable of maintaining such a collected front as long as he had; but all the same she wasn’t going to take a chance.
‘Anyway, I’m interested. It’s a long, complicated business – there are other cases linked with the women – and I’d like to sort this out for myself. Look, may I use your phone?’
‘Oh, yes, by all means.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Can you give it a couple of minutes? My colleague should be finished with his patient very soon and I’ll be able to get into my office. If you can spare the time?’
‘I’m not sure …’ she began but even as she opened her mouth there was a sound down the corridor and he lifted his head.
‘Good,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘There she goes now. Just a minute.’ He made for the door, George following closely.
The haemorrhoid cream advertisement was hipping her way along the corridor, a drooping woman wand
ering behind her with a faintly bemused expression on her face. ‘If you’ll just come into the office, Mrs Henderson,’ the advertisement fluted, ‘I’ll sort out the bill. Will it be cash or credit card? Dr Agula much prefers the former, if it’s possible.’
Philip’s office down in the basement was as handsome as his waiting room. Here the walls were a clinical cream and there was a good deal of chrome and glittering glass about to give it a surgical air, but there were also soft chairs and a wide modern desk in pale wood in front of the big window that looked out to the area, above which the railings that fronted Harley Street showed glimpses of passing feet. The man sitting at the desk was wearing a white coat that buttoned across one shoulder, which made him look like an advertisement too, this time for something even more intimate than haemorrhoid cream, George thought, and was writing up some notes.
‘All right with you if I check my files for something, Agula? I need a couple of things. And my, er, friend here needs to use the phone. Dr Barnabas, Dr Agula.’
‘With pleasure,’ Agula said. He had a rich deep voice that matched his large dark eyes and a soulful expression. George wondered what sort of consultant he was, and didn’t like to ask. But he led the way.
‘How d’ye do, Dr Barnabas. Go ahead, Cobbett. We have to talk. Mrs Henderson made appointments for treatments for the next six months,’ he said in high satisfaction.
‘We’ll discuss it,’ Philip said vaguely, looking uneasily at George. ‘Not now. Rather pushed.’
‘What sort of treatments?’ George said innocently, as one doctor to another, and Agula winked.
‘High colonic lavage,’ he said. ‘They love it, these uptight sorts. Does ’em a world of good too. Well, I must be going. Have to be in the King’s Road in fifteen minutes. We’ll talk on the phone about future arrangements, then, Cobbett?’
‘Oh, yes, absolutely,’ Philip said, his head down over a drawer he had pulled from a filing cabinet in the far corner. Agula nodded cheerfully at George and went, and she took his place at the desk and reached for the phone.
‘High colonic lavage?’ she murmured.
Philip looked at her sideways. ‘He was the only one who answered my ad,’ he said. ‘And if some people like it, who am I to interfere?’
‘I suppose so. But doesn’t it sicken you? These people who make money out of colluding with patients’ nastier fantasies?’
‘I try not to make judgements,’ Philip said, and George felt herself wince in embarrassment.
‘I suppose I can be a bit censorious sometimes. OK. No more about Agula. Let’s stick to what we’re here for.’ She picked up the phone and dialled Mike’s number.
It was engaged and she hung up and bit her lip. Now what? Call the nick? Maybe by now Gus would have finished there? It was well into the afternoon and surely it wouldn’t be wrong to try to reach him? But she held back still. The embarrassment he’d suffer if she talked to the wrong person would be considerable. And by ‘wrong person’, she knew she meant Rupert Dudley.
Philip emerged from his filing cabinet with a couple of folders in his hand. ‘I thought I’d see if there was anything else in their notes that might be useful to you,’ he said. ‘But I doubt there’s anything here I haven’t already told you.’ He read aloud, ‘Lisa Zizi, number seven Ropemakers’ Fields House, Wapping. Age thirty-seven. No, I’ve told you all about her – nothing else in this one. And here’s Shirley Candrell. This’ll be the same, I’m sure. Address, eleven to seventeen St Saviour’s Yard, Bermondsey. Age twenty-four. Her complaint was of a …’
He murmured on, but George wasn’t listening now. She was staring at him, her face creased in a frown.
‘What did you say?’
‘What?’ He looked up at her. ‘Oh, swelling in the left orbital fossa –’
‘No. Before that. Her address.’
‘Eleven to seventeen, St Saviour’s Yard,’ he said. ‘And she was just twenty-four. Very young.’
‘But she didn’t live there! She lived near Lisa. In Wapping. That’s where –’ She stopped and caught her breath, and sat very still.
After a moment he said, ‘Perhaps that was her work place? Sometimes patients do prefer not to give home addresses, don’t they?’
‘Maybe she did do some work there,’ George said a little dryly. ‘Prostitutes work in all sorts of places.’
‘I’d forgotten about that.’ Philip went a little pink. ‘Silly of me. Well, maybe it was a friend’s place? Or an accommodation address.’
‘No,’ George said. ‘It was neither of those. I know just what it was. That’s Connie’s place.’
‘Who?’ Philip said, now completely lost.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ George was jubilant suddenly. ‘Oh, Michael, Michael get off the phone!’ She redialled his number, praying the line would be clear. It wasn’t.
She rubbed both hands through her hair in an agony of indecision. That she had to go to Connie’s and find out all she could about why Shirley Candrell had given Connie’s yard as her address was undoubted. She was itching to go right now, but she had to tell Mike what she was doing. Such commonsense as had not been stifled by her impatience told her she shouldn’t go there till she’d told him and asked him to come too. There could be dangerous people there. After all, Lisa and Shirley were dead. And so was the owner of that leg, who was, she was certain, Don Greeson. But leave it much longer, she thought as she glanced at her watch, and the day would be gone and maybe Connie would have left. She had to go, and go now.
She looked up to see Philip gazing at her owlishly and at once knew the answer.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘This phone has a last number redial facility?’
‘What? Oh, yes.’
‘Then keep on trying the number I dialled, will you? And when Mr Urquhart answers, tell him I have an urgent message for him. That I’ve gone to St Saviour’s Yard – give him that address in Shirley’s file – and ask him to come as soon as he can. Tell him I’m sure the answer to everything is there at Connie’s. Got that?’
‘Connie’s,’ he repeated like a child with a lesson book, ‘got that,’ and she jumped to her feet, reached for her bag and fled as fast as she could go.
33
The combination of Friday afternoon as the start of the weekend and the continuing hot spell that had left London tarmac soft and everybody irritable and sweaty had clotted the traffic almost to a standstill. She took over ten minutes just to get round the one-way system from Harley Street back to the Marylebone Road so that she could turn east and head for the City and ultimately Tower Bridge, and by the time she at last slotted herself into the almost static huddle of cars and vans and buses on the Marylebone Road she was a wreck. Her shirt was wet with sweat and her hair was clinging in damp tendrils to her forehead. But there was no way she was going to give up. No matter how long it took her, she’d get to Connie’s, and prayed that there would be someone still there so that she could get into the building, look about, see what she could find.
There were, she told herself, at least two good reasons for seeing the place as the focus of her investigation. One was the macerating machine; another was Mike’s news that he had flushed Lenny out of Brighton in a search for his brother. It would have to be Connie’s Lenny would go to ultimately, George told herself, convinced as she was that that was where Don had died. There had to be a connection between Don and Connie that she didn’t yet know of, but which Lenny did. She hung on to that notion determinedly, even though equally firmly held beliefs about this case had been shattered: like the role Philip Cobbett had played.
But even if I’m wrong, she thought when at last the traffic began to move and she reached the approach to the Euston Road underpass, the fact that Shirley Candrell gave Connie’s yard as her address is a good enough reason, all on its own, for me to go there to look for answers. And somehow I’ve got to get there soon.
She abandoned her original planned route and turned south at the corner of Euston Road to push her way alon
g Kingsway to the Adelphi, and on down to Waterloo Bridge. Maybe the going would be easier on the south side of the water, she thought, and for a moment was diverted by her own behaviour. In just a few years she had become the complete Londoner, learning by heart the complicated map of her adopted city, picking up all the tricks of London drivers who knew how to duck and dive through the metropolis and prizing every minute shaved off a journey time as a major achievement. As indeed it was.
By the time she reached Jamaica Road it was past seven o’clock and the traffic had thinned a little, and as she made the plunge into the tangle of narrow streets that led towards the riverside and Connie’s yard, she felt a prickle of apprehension run down the back of her neck. Perhaps coming here on her own had been wrong, dangerous even? But she’d done all she could to get a message to Mike, and she was sure that once he got it, he’d turn out to meet her there. That in itself was a protection. Perhaps she could consider calling Gus? But she quailed at that. Even if she managed to reach him he would be furious with her for trying to do this at all. His advice – which would be forcibly expressed – would be to leave the job to the professionals: himself and his colleagues.
And I can’t do that, she whispered to the windscreen as she peered through it for the turning to Connie’s yard. Because he’s suspended right now, and has no power at all.
The yard was full of vans and lorries, just as it had been the last time she came here, but there was no bustle around them. They were all locked up, it seemed, and put away for the weekend; and she frowned, trying to remember what Gregory St Clair had told her. Had he said they worked shifts here?
That there were people who worked at night as well as during the day? Even if they did, though, perhaps the weekends were different, with no shifts at night on Fridays and Saturdays? She couldn’t remember, however hard she tried, and decided the safest thing to do was to assume the place was occupied.
She had paused at the entrance to the yard to peer in and now, instead of turning in and parking there – and there were spaces where she could – she moved on, taking the car round the next corner to park it tidily between a battered old Ford Capri and an elderly white van which smelled strongly of fish. I’ll be safer if it’s here, she thought, locking it, and then was annoyed with herself. It didn’t make the slightest difference to her safety where she parked the car, for heaven’s sake! She was safe anywhere. Broad daylight in a big city like this? Silly to fuss.
Third Degree Page 33