by Mairi Chong
How then, had it gone so disastrously wrong, Fraser asked himself. Oh, the horror of returning from the asthma meeting the following day. He had gone straight to his room assuming that the commotion was the other doctors attempting to resuscitate Jackson. Above anything else, Fraser did not want to see or hear that. It was only when the ambulance had gone, its blue lights illuminating Fraser’s room fleetingly as they passed, accelerating out onto the main road, that he had felt safe to emerge.
The shock, the utter horror, he had felt on hearing that it was, in fact, Dr Hope who had taken the drink. He had killed an innocent man. And still, Jackson walked free. Not only had he survived his assassination attempt, but he lived guilt and blame-free, unlike poor, tortured Fraser.
22
Cathy had been consulting and had missed the commotion, until as a patient had left, Brenda had come unexpectedly into her room, slamming the door behind her.
‘Brenda, what on earth?’ Cathy had asked as she looked up at the woman’s flushed countenance.
It seemed that Brenda had been in her own room. She had dealt with the police earlier on, when they had been asking about the CCTV and the emergency buzzer system. Cathy had made the practice manager pause.
‘Was the CCTV on then?’ she interrupted, and Brenda had looked uncomfortable. It turned out that Brenda had decided to use it only as a visual deterrent, as they were trying to cut costs. ‘I doubt there would have been anything to see anyway,’ Cathy reassured her. ‘What about the buzzer system? That’s always on, isn’t it?’
The practice, as with most GP surgeries had a system in place with hidden emergency buzzers below the desks in all the consulting rooms. This was for the doctors’ or nurses’ safety, so that if they had a difficult or abusive patient, help could be summoned without drawing attention to the fact. Cathy had already wondered why Mark hadn’t activated the system if he was in trouble.
Brenda nodded impatiently. ‘The detective asked about that and I told him it was on. You know yourself; it can be switched off at the front desk, but the staff won’t touch it without my permission.’
‘Sorry Brenda, go on. After they spoke with you, what happened?’ Cathy asked.
‘I thought they’d left. They said they were taking some things from the coffee room to analyse. I wasn’t really paying attention because I had a phone call, you see?’
Cathy nodded and waited.
‘So, imagine my horror,’ Brenda said, pausing for effect. ‘I was just tidying up and I heard the back door not ten minutes ago. You know what a din it makes, clanging? The three of them came out. I watched it all from my room. The two detectives and him. I could barely believe my eyes.’
‘Who, Brenda?’ Cathy had asked.
‘James. Dr Longmuir. They led him to the police car and drove away.’
Cathy had been forced to continue her afternoon surgery, with the weight of this news on her shoulders. Having got through, but not having done a particularly good job for her patients, she found herself, at the end of the long day, considering what this latest development meant for them.
Brenda stood at her doorway once more, clearly having had time to think. ‘I’m heading home, Cathy. No good will come of brooding on it. We’ll know more in the morning and like I say, he’ll be back in and making light of the situation, no doubt.’
Cathy wondered if she said this as much to comfort herself, as anything. Brenda looked tired. Her eyes were serious despite her smile. Cathy supposed that it had been probably more of a strain on her than the rest of them.
‘None of it’s right though, Brenda,’ Cathy said, rubbing her temple trying to clear her mind ‘I don’t know what to believe anymore. I know it was James apparently, who took down Mark’s coffee that day, but they must have something more. Surely they must know something we don’t?’
Brenda shrugged and moved her handbag to her other arm. ‘I asked about the postmortem results this afternoon and they said they still hadn’t heard. The grumpy one told me that it sometimes took weeks to get a result back.’
‘Well there has to be something,’ Cathy said and sighing, she let her pen fall on her desk with a clatter.
‘Go home, Cathy,’ Brenda warned. ‘No good will come of sitting around here moping. You need to look after yourself.’
Cathy glanced up at Brenda, who caught her eye.
‘This morning,’ she said. ‘I could smell it on you, the alcohol.’
Cathy felt her face redden but she didn’t speak, and Brenda continued.
‘A glass is fine, but just watch, that’s all I’m saying. I’m not one to judge and really, it’s none of my business, but we need you more than ever Cathy. I’m relying on you to hold this practice together with me. Don’t let things get like last time, please.’
Cathy watched Brenda go, having promised the practice manager that she would turn off all the lights and computers when she herself left. She listened as Brenda’s heels sounded on the carpeted corridor outside. She heard the back door open, and then slam shut.
Cathy had promised to lock up also. Usually, it was Brenda or Bert who saw to this, but she knew what to do. She watched as the practice manager walked to her car and then saw the headlights as they caught the building, momentarily illuminating her own room, and then turning out onto the main road, to join the others heading home. Cathy sat, unaware of time. Her room grew darker, and the orange glow from the streetlights outside gave the place an air of abandonment. Cathy shivered. The radiator by her desk clunked twice, making her jump. The heating must be going off now, Cathy assumed.
She turned the day’s events over and over in her mind. The police had got this all wrong. She knew James better than most. He was gentle and kind. He was vulnerable. For all she knew, the man might even be depressed. Cathy wondered if he had spoken to anyone after losing his wife. There was surely no way he could have had anything to do with Mark. She pressed her forehead trying somehow to make her thoughts clarify, smoothing her fingers across her eyebrows.
One partner dead and another a suspect. And Brenda was right. It now fell to her. The weight of the practice’s future was on her shoulders.
Cathy spun herself around in her chair and getting up, left her room, walking down the corridor and back towards reception. As she came level with James’s door, she paused, and then continued, following the ground-level lighting that lit the building in the evening.
James had been very good to her over the years and she couldn’t bear to see his reputation shattered over a misunderstanding. She supposed that patients would soon start to lose trust in him as a doctor if the police kept him in for any length of time. ‘No smoke without fire’ would be the uneducated gossip’s viewpoint. She wondered if that bloody news crew had got a photograph of him sitting in the back of the police car as they had driven away. They had continued to sit outside the place that morning, hoping for a story. She hoped that James had had the presence of mind to turn the other way and avoid the flash of the camera if they had caught him.
Standing in the empty waiting room now, Cathy considered. She wasn’t a fool. If Mark had been murdered, and the word still jarred, even without it being voiced. But if he had been killed, then she knew that James had a motive. She recalled the last practice meeting and the sneering manner with which Mark had addressed his senior partner. Not only that, Cathy thought, but he had done it so often in front of the rest of the team. That would have been dreadful for James, and who knew what had been going on in her absence? Perhaps James had suffered a great deal while she had been away. He and Mark had always had a brittle relationship, but she could just imagine Mark getting more and more bullish, while James became more and more withdrawn.
Cathy left the waiting room and continued along the corridor to the nurses’ rooms. All the doors were shut of course. If the police had been told that James had brought Mark his last drink before dying, then yes, she could understand why they suspected him. Motive and opportunity. It did make sense. However, the police did
n’t understand. James took his duty as a professional more seriously than most. Cathy felt sure that he must have gone to Mark’s room with the coffee, to try and make peace, not to murder the man. She could just imagine James psyching himself up for the conversation in his room all that morning. What had passed between them, ultimately only James now knew. Poor James, he must feel very alone and afraid. Cathy supposed that he might think she suspected him too, and that was why she hadn’t been into his room to speak since the tragedy. What a mess it had all become.
Cathy didn’t know what they were going to do, or how the practice could function without him, even if he was only away for a short time. She turned in the corridor and began to walk back, retracing her steps, not thinking as she did so. She paused by the drugs store and without considering what she was doing, opened the door and went in, flicking on the light switch with a nonchalance that suggested that what she was doing, was entirely routine.
She knew that they were labelled alphabetically, and it would be on the top. Oh God, what a horrible day it had been. The handle felt cold to her touch and she startled slightly as she slid out the drawer and it creaked. The boxes and bottles were aligned neatly. She deserved this. Things had been tough. Cathy knew that Irene, as with all of her jobs, took hers of keeping the storerooms neat, very seriously indeed. She touched the cardboard box, stroking the top, allowing her fingers to hover over the braille print that labelled every drug available these days. Inside, she felt the weight of the bottle, and then the capsules shift within, tinkling against the side. So easy. It would be just so easy.
She felt the familiar longing and a voice in her head pleaded that it would only be one. Just tonight, to help her sleep. Imagine how good it would feel to sleep, in blissful ignorance of the previous day’s events, to be oblivious and lost to it all, to float and to tumble on the codeine-based cloud. It would work faster and better than wine, and come morning, Brenda wouldn’t smell the tell-tale signs of alcohol. She would awaken refreshed and able to cope. No-one would know.
As she pulled the door shut to the store and walked back to her room, Cathy realised how close she had come. It was only as she began to set the alarm at the rear of the building that she heard a noise and froze. But surely it must have been her imagination. Momentarily, she wondered if she might not have been alone. She stood listening, but no further sound came. Shaking her head ruefully, she closed the door to the practice. Guilty conscience, she thought to herself.
23
‘Brenda, is there any news?’ Cathy asked the next day.
She had come in especially early that morning having awoken with a new urgency and drive to clear James’s name, and when she knocked on Brenda’s door having seen two minor injuries that had walked in before morning surgeries had started, she felt her spirits rise further.
Brenda turned and beamed at her. ‘He’s just called. Thank goodness Cathy, he’s home. Got home late last night and sounds exhausted. I told him to leave coming in, but he’s insisting on doing on-calls this afternoon and he’s told me to open up his morning surgery tomorrow.’ Brenda exhaled. ‘Oh God, what a relief. I’d been phoning around the locums already and they’re all booked up. I hardly slept thinking about him.’
Cathy smiled. ‘We’ll manage whatever, like you said before. Linda and both nurses are in today. We can only do what we can do.’
Brenda nodded. ‘Yes, that’s fine. I got myself in a bit of a state about things.’
As Cathy returned to her room, she considered all they knew about the dreadful event so far. Already, Cathy had thought a good deal about the problem. It seemed to her now most unlikely that Mark had taken his own life. She thought also, if the police had taken James in for questioning, they too had their doubts. Assuming then that circumstances made suicide highly improbable; Mark’s character for one, and the fact that he was in the middle of morning surgery, it appeared that only accident or murder were the alternatives. Whatever Mark had drunk, and Cathy assumed that it was a liquid he had consumed given the mess of his airway, it must have been administered in such a way that he was unaware that he was taking it. Something clear perhaps, and of not such strong taste or smell that he might realise. Cathy knew very little about toxins really. As GPs, they saw accidental poisonings so infrequently and the majority ended up in A&E, but in Mark’s case, whatever had caused such damage had been caustic to the extreme. Cathy doubted very much that it could have been completely odourless. Without cutting corners, she then arrived at the same conclusion that she assumed the police had: that the poison had been administered in Mark’s coffee. The coffee, strong and bitter in taste, might well prove an excellent disguise for a noxious substance.
Cathy thought of the ways in which a poison might have been added to the cup. There was a chance that it had been mixed in with the coffee granules, the water or the milk. Cathy knew that Mark did not take sugar, so she could rule this out at least. Then there was the cup itself. If someone had swilled the poison around the sides beforehand. But all these things troubled her. How might one guarantee that Mark alone took the drink and nobody else inadvertently? As far as Cathy was aware, no-one in the practice had their own special mugs, and the coffee granules, milk and obviously boiled water, would have been shared by all.
The only conclusion was that the poison had been added after the drink was made and declared ready for Dr Hope. Cathy herself had been in her room still of course, when the coffee making had been taking place. She knew how on a usual day, things worked, however. She was still to find out why James had taken the mug of drink down to Mark instead of one of the receptionists, but while James was absent, she thought that she might still investigate this line of inquiry.
By coffee time and after a hectic morning consulting, Cathy realised that she would have to be quick if she was going to afford this luxury before heading out to begin the ever-lengthening list of house visits. She knew though that this morning, her coffee break was far more important than usual. She had made her decision during morning consultations and it seemed to her the only way forward. She must test out her theory. She recognised that James was not the person responsible for Mark’s death, but fearing the police’s continued interest in him, she felt compelled to try and prove it herself. If she could just verify that it was possible for the coffee to have been poisoned by not just James as he carried it downstairs, but anyone in the room before James took the cup, she might have something to go on.
Having first washed her hands, Cathy slipped a five-millilitre syringe from the drawer in her room. She removed the cellophane. She took a polystyrene cup by the sink and filled it with water from the tap She drew back the syringe plunger and submerged the tip, she pushed the plunger down and then drew back again, watching as the water sucked up to the mark. Perfect. She might get a slightly soggy pocket, but she was ready to see if the poison could have been administered this way without notice.
Michelle and Julie were already upstairs in the kitchenette. Julie had found the remnants of the ginger cake and was wondering if the police had looked at this too.
‘Not much left anyway, do you want a bit? Dr Moreland, you look like you need cake.’
Cathy leaned over the girl’s shoulder. The cake looked like a crumbled brick, but the strong ginger smelled good and she was hungry.
‘Yes, please. No icing for me though.’
Cathy’s heart began to beat faster. She slipped her hand in her pocket and toyed with the plastic syringe. Turning it over and over. She was close enough to both to try out her little experiment, but she felt too exposed, they were both too attentive. At that moment, Brenda came in.
‘Morning Brenda,’ Cathy said too brightly. ‘How’s it been for you then?’
‘Morning. Busy,’ Brenda said, moving to the cupboards to take a cup for herself. ‘Has this water heater been on all night? How many times do I have to say to switch things off? If you could see the bills I have to deal with.’ Brenda turned, only then realising that all eyes were on he
r and looked suddenly embarrassed. ‘I’ve been trying to ring round and get locum-cover all this morning,’ she said more evenly.
‘And? Any luck?’ Cathy asked.
Brenda was now shaking the sugar bowl and knocking the side to dislodge the remaining granules. ‘No, I haven’t managed yet. Half of them say they won’t do house visits, and some are only free to do a handful of odd days here and there.’
‘Brenda, have you thought about asking Linda to take on an extra session, at least until we’re able to find permanent cover? I’m sure she’d be delighted to be asked.’
Cathy had still to speak with Linda about her error in giving the wrong flu vaccination to a child. As far as she was aware the mother had decided to let the matter drop. The partners had written a letter of apology, promising that they had already made changes to the way things were being done to avoid such a mistake occurring again. Definitely not partnership material, Cathy thought of Linda, but she would mop up some of the empty shifts at least, giving her and James a chance to trouble-shoot over the coming weeks when he returned also.
‘I’ve already asked Linda,’ said Brenda sighing. ‘She’s committed to another locum job and can only do four sessions for us until mid-October. Anyway, I don’t have time to keep ringing around,’ Brenda said. ‘I need to go out later, but I’ll be back mid-afternoon and take up the hunt again then.’
Cathy shook her head. ‘Sorry Brenda, but James and I can only see so many people. You’ll need to sort something, and fast. I’ve barely had a chance to look at lab results this morning and you’ll have seen the house calls mounting up.’
‘Here you are Dr Moreland,’ Michelle said, interrupting and handing her a plate. ‘Take a bite of that first before you head out on your visits.’