by Mairi Chong
So much of his life had changed since his decision to kill. Since Dr Hope’s death, Fraser had found that his interest at work, something that had once been his life, was now completely impossible. Before, his occupation had given him such joy and purpose. He had found it stimulating and rewarding in so many ways, but now, he couldn’t read a single page without his mind wandering. Decisions over even the smallest of matters were absolutely terrifying to him. It was insufferable, knowing that he was failing at his career so horribly.
On the evening of Tracy’s death, Fraser had sat hunched and uncomfortable. The television was on and Sarah sat beside him sewing the hem of some garment or other and quietly murmuring the odd comment, although thankfully not expecting much from him in return. Perhaps she had known all along, Fraser considered, for when the doorbell rang, she did not seem unduly surprised despite the late hour.
‘Don’t answer it,’ he had said automatically as she went to get up.
‘Why ever not, Fraser?’ It might be important.’
Sarah had gone to the door, shaking her head and smiling. ‘You’re so jumpy just now,’ she had said.
Fraser felt that this moment might well be the pivotal one in his whole existence. When Sarah returned with the police officers, leading them through with a concerned expression on her face, Fraser could hardly bring himself to look at her. An icy hand seemed to close around his heart and he felt suddenly quite emotionless.
‘I’ll get my jacket. I know what this is about,’ he said, getting up and walking to the door. ‘Not here,’ he heard himself saying to the police officer closest to him. ‘Please, not here.’
‘I understand that it’s been a very distressing few hours for you, Mr Edwards, but if you’d just go through it again?’
Fraser sat with his head in his hands. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone, and his hair was ruffled. He looked up at the police detective, his eyes, bloodshot. ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ he asked. His voice was flat. ‘I’ve explained already, I had nothing to do with her death. Why won’t you believe me?’
The police officer sighed. ‘My colleague is currently interviewing someone else as we speak, and I must warn you, that their account might well implicate you further. Wouldn’t it be better to tell the truth?’
Fraser remained tight-lipped.
‘Let’s go through your movements one last time. You said that you looked at the clock in your office at five-thirty. You’d been working there all afternoon. Remind me, was there a reason at all to leave your room that afternoon?’
Fraser sighed and shook his head.
‘For the purposes of the recording, Mr Edwards has shaken his head,’ the detective stated. ‘Mr Edwards, think hard. You can’t really expect me to believe that you had been in your office since lunchtime and you’d not even got up to go to the toilet? The rest of the practice seem to take a coffee break mid-afternoon. Perhaps you’ve forgotten a trip upstairs.’
‘I didn’t go upstairs for coffee with them. I’d stopped all that a while ago.’
‘I see,’ the detective said. ‘And was there a reason for stopping that? A falling out? I must tell you that we have been interviewing the rest of the practice team and we do know that you and the now-deceased Dr Hope weren’t on the best of terms.’
Fraser sighed. It was true. No-one had betrayed him in telling the police the facts. He stared straight ahead now and barely heard what the other man said.
‘Mr Edwards?’ the detective repeated.
Finally, when Fraser spoke, his voice sounded odd and choked.
‘The truth is, that I am a coward,’ he said.
The police officer didn’t speak.
Fraser swallowed. It had to come out. ‘I found her,’ he said, feeling as if the words were lodged in his throat. He looked desperately from the detective to the police officer who stood by the door of the interview room.
The solicitor sitting by Fraser’s side reached out a hand. ‘Mr Edwards? Can I warn you …?’
But Fraser shook his head forcefully. ‘No, no. It’s no use. They need to know,’ he said, and then turning back to the detective: ‘I did stay in my room all afternoon. It’s quite true. I’ve been avoiding someone in the practice. I know you think it was Dr Hope I had a problem with, but you’re wrong. I’ll be the first to admit that the two of us didn’t hit it off. He was a difficult man to work with. No doubt, you’ve heard that. But I wished him no harm at all. I was shocked, horrified when I heard he had died. And as for Tracy …’ Fraser sighed and looked skyward. His eyes suddenly filled with tears. ‘Oh God!’ he moaned. ‘It was awful. She was lying there. I saw the blood.’ He sniffed and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt. ‘I should have raised the alarm, of course I should. I did go upstairs, but far later. I panicked. It was foolish. It was a cowardly act, I realise that. What poor Dr Moreland must have thought then, going into the room and finding her …’
Fraser ran his hands through his hair. His fingers were tense and his knuckles white. For some minutes, he was quite inconsolable. The detective glanced at the solicitor.
‘Perhaps we should take a break,’ the solicitor said.
The detective raised a forefinger in warning. ‘Five more minutes,’ he said softly.
They waited until Fraser had regained his composure.
‘Mr Edwards, I can see how difficult you’re finding this, but I must get it clear. Let’s back-track from the actual day itself. You mentioned that you were avoiding someone in the practice. Can I ask who that person was?’
Fraser’s lip trembled. He looked down at his hands, now clasped tightly in his lap.
Having spent the past endless days fighting to keep his secret safe, doing anything and everything to prevent his guilt from being realised, he knew it now had to come.
He met the other man’s eyes and nodded.
The confession came surprisingly easily. A wave of profound relief swept over him.
‘It was meant for Jackson,’ he said, almost spitting the name out. ‘I did kill Dr Hope, but it wasn’t supposed to be him.’ The words fell as almost a wail of despair. ‘It was Jackson. It never should have happened that way. That animal was meant to be consulting alongside Dr Hope. The mug was his too. I don’t know how Dr Hope came to drink from it.’
This, of course, led onto his reasoning as to why he wanted Jackson dead. Funnily enough, it was the historic crime of stealing hospital medication to satisfy Jackson’s demands, that caused Fraser the greatest anguish.
He looked at the detective finally and waited for his judgement. The man remained tight-lipped. Fraser thought he would rather have had his disgust and outrage, than his passivity.
34
Cathy slept late into the next morning. When she awoke, she was confused, and it took her a second or two to realise where she was. She had stayed over several times before of course, but that morning something seemed different. Cathy allowed her eyes to become accustomed to the glare filtering around the curtains’ edges. It was only then that she remembered the reason for being in her friend’s house, and she shuddered, recalling the previous evening’s ordeal.
When she went downstairs, she found that the house was empty, but Suzalinna had left a note on the kitchen counter telling her to stay put, to help herself to food, and that she would be home from work at six. Cathy opened the fridge door, but she couldn’t face eating. Even the mug of tea that she prepared was more for the comfort of the ritual that the actual desire to drink. Having showered and dressed, she felt a little better. She saw her car keys next to the fruit bowl and assumed that Saj must have collected her car from the practice the previous night. Impulsively, she decided that she couldn’t just sit around waiting for her friend to return. Snatching up the keys, she left the house.
It was gone ten o’clock when she pulled into the practice carpark and abandoning her car parked at a jaunty angle, called out to him as she crossed towards the back door.
‘I believe I have you to
thank for my release from the police last night?’ she said to the old man.
Bert was semi-stooped; his overalls engulfed his body and he had an oversized plastic backpack slung on his back. It seemed to weigh heavily on his shoulders, causing him to move with greater deliberateness that usual. He turned and smiled but continued to work. Cathy wondered if he had heard what she said. In his hand, he held a nozzle which was connected to the container on his back. His hands were gloved. Cathy saw that he wore surgical gloves rather than work ones. A fine spray of clear liquid shot from the outlet. Bert it seemed, found great satisfaction in such work. He moved slowly from patch to patch, painstakingly attending to the weeds that had begun to spring up around the carpark over the last few weeks. He finished with a crack in the paving by Cathy’s feet, that seemed to have grown particularly wild, and gave her a sideways glance.
‘Police?’ he said smirking. ‘Those fools don’t know anything.’
‘But it looks as if it was Fraser all along,’ Cathy said. ‘He killed Dr Hope and then, I suppose, rejected by Tracy, or afraid that she had seen something, he killed her too.’
The old man lifted the nozzle and looked into it speculatively. ‘They need to start asking the right people,’ he said elusively, shaking the plastic tubing. The old man’s attention was drawn to an unwanted plant in his peripheral vision. Swivelling from Cathy, he aimed and shot at it with the clear fluid. The fine spray settled on the unfortunate vegetation. ‘They need to ask the right questions,’ Bert went on, ‘and then they’ll know,’ he said.
‘Bert,’ Cathy said suddenly. ‘Is that weedkiller kept in the practice?’
Bert chuckled as if she had just told him a hilarious joke.
‘It’s about time someone asked me about what’s kept here instead of just rifling around in my cupboard,’ he said ambiguously.
Cathy gave up this line of questioning and hurried on inside. Going to her room, she could feel her thoughts beginning to race. Was it the practice’s weedkiller that had been used then to kill Mark? Could it have possibly been in the coffee? Cathy recalled Fraser’s talk on poisons only the week before Mark died. She began to quickly rummage through the papers by the side of her desk. It had to be here somewhere. Finally, she found what she was after: the print-out from Fraser’s talk. She flicked through the slides that he had annotated. The police had said it was hydrocarbon poisoning. Cathy ran her finger down the list of domestic hydrocarbons that were listed as risks for accidental poisoning. Weedkiller wasn’t on the list, it was itemised under organophosphates, probably an equally horrible class of toxin, but not the one Mark had swallowed. Cathy looked at the list again, and only then she saw what she was after. Of course. It had been there in front of her all along.
But did it mean that it was still Fraser? Could the practice pharmacist really be a viable perpetrator of such a heinous crime? In truth, Cathy still wasn’t convinced. Anyone at the practice meeting that night, who had heard Fraser’s talk, could have been inspired to use poison to kill. Mentally, Cathy ran through motives, but everyone seemed to have a loose reason to want Mark out of the way. The man wasn’t exactly liked within the practice. Granted, Cathy still couldn’t see a palpable purpose to kill, and what of Tracy? Cathy thought of the silly girl standing only the day before in the front reception. The nurse had sounded as if she knew something about Mark’s death. Cathy tried to recall exactly what she had said but found that she couldn’t. Was that the reason for her death also? Cathy sat down and frantically thought. Who then had opportunity?
James came into her room at that moment without knocking. The door had been ajar, and Cathy sat hunched at her desk with her jacket still on. She looked up.
‘James,’ she said, almost confused to see him there. ‘Free at last. I can’t believe they thought it was you in the first place and then, I think they might have wondered if it was me. What a mess.’
James bent down and hugged her awkwardly, he rarely showed signs of affection. His arms fell once more to his sides and Cathy saw that his suit jacket was creased.
‘Listen, James,’ she said, her voice beginning to rise. ‘I’m trying to work it all out, and I think I’m onto something. I’m not sure it was Fraser after all. Bert’s in the carpark with weedkiller and it made me think, you know?’
Cathy was almost shouting in her excitement and James sat down next to her.
‘Oh Cathy, my dear, dear friend, Cathy. You have been under a lot of strain recently. Dealing with Mark’s death and then the practice while I was away, and the horror of finding that girl.’ James shook his head sadly. ‘All of that on top of your own diagnosis. You’ve been so unwell, Cathy. I think we’ve asked too much.’
‘I know. I know, but listen to this, James,’ Cathy went on. ‘It was in the coffee. Remember the talk? You took the coffee down to him and it must have been poisoned already. Someone had done it before you got the cup. It must have been in the coffee room. Someone in the coffee room did it.’
James smiled. ‘Cathy, the police have been through all of this with me already, while I was in the station. Do you think they’ve been just sitting twiddling their thumbs this whole time? The postmortem showed that poor Mark had been poisoned and yes, we all know it was some domestic hydrocarbon.’
‘I know, I know,’ Cathy almost shouted again. ‘They said it at the inquest!’
‘But Cathy, listen,’ James went on. His voice was smooth and slow. He sounded as if he had said the words a thousand times before. ‘Mark’s coffee cup was sitting by the sink in his room. It was washed up, I grant you, he was a meticulous, obsessive-compulsive idiot, but the police said that they couldn’t detect any trace of poison in that cup. Cathy, there was no hydrocarbon in Mark’s coffee that day.’
Cathy took a moment to digest this new piece of information. ‘Well,’ she finally said, ‘that just means he cleaned the cup extremely well. Nothing more. He always washed up after his coffee.’
James shook his head once more, but still, she went on.
‘Listen, Bert has a whole cupboard full of potential poisons for cleaning and painting. Anyone, anyone could have gone in and taken something and squirted it in the cup.’
She let out a sigh and flopped back in her chair.
‘Oh God, James, why aren’t you listening? I even tested it out. I managed to squirt tap water into Julie’s mug without anyone spotting it the other day. I was sure that was the way it had been done, before you even touched the mug. I know I’m right. Anyway James, what did you say to him that morning when you took him the coffee? What did you talk about?’
James sighed. He looked as if he was considering what to say. When he did explain, he spoke in the same level tone, but Cathy knew it must pain him. ‘I told him I was resigning,’ James said. ‘I said that I was going to take early retirement. I’d had enough. It was for the greater good of the practice.’
Cathy moved forward in her seat. ‘What did he say?’
‘He just sat there and sipped his coffee. He didn’t seem surprised.’ James shook his head.
He looked so tired, Cathy thought. ‘So, now what?’ she asked.
James shifted and re-crossed his legs. ‘Well, I need to sort this mess out before I even consider early retirement.’ He smiled. ‘I’m not jumping ship just yet, Cathy, don’t panic.’
Brenda walked in looking flustered. A strand of her usually neatly pinned hair had come awry and inexplicably, the dishevelled look of her practice manager made Cathy want to laugh.
‘You are not going to believe this,’ Brenda said dramatically, unaware of Cathy’s inner turmoil. ‘The police have been on the phone again, asking me all sorts of questions about Fraser and our plans to begin methadone prescribing.’
Cathy looked at her sharply. ‘What? But we haven’t even set up the methadone clinic yet,’ she said.
Brenda rubbed the back of her own neck. ‘I don’t know what it’s all about, Cathy. They aren’t releasing him though they said.’
‘Are they ch
arging him with murder then?’ Cathy asked.
‘Well, they’d hardly be likely to tell me that, would they?’ Brenda snapped. Cathy grimaced and the practice manager lowered her voice. ‘They’re coming in soon and will want to speak to you about the plans for the clinic.’
‘Jesus,’ Cathy exploded.
Brenda looked acutely uncomfortable and hastily shut the door completely with a bang.
‘Cathy,’ she hissed. ‘I’m sure it’s been a very difficult time for you, what with finding Tracy and all that’s happened.’ Cathy rolled her eyes, but Brenda continued. ‘And I’m sorry to be the one to hit you with the news about Fraser today also, but while James is here, I need to let you know that we’ve had a serious complaint from a patient. It came in just this morning,’ Brenda said, turning to James who now sat with his head in his hands. Brenda turned back to Cathy. ‘Cathy, I’m afraid the complaint is about your professional conduct.’
Cathy slapped the table. ‘What? Who?’ and then in sudden realisation, it came to her. ‘That bloody drug seeker,’ she said. ‘He tried to blackmail me into giving him dihydrocodeine. I might have guessed. Mark saw through his little routine. He was the last patient he saw before he died.’
‘Cathy,’ Brenda said as unemotionally as she could, ‘that’s really not the point. You know how we deal with serious complaints and with your past history, we have to be even more stringent.’
Cathy had spun in her chair and was now surveying the carpark through the blinds, but the shapes were blurred with her tears. When she spoke again, she refused to look at Brenda.
‘Are you for real, Brenda?’ Finally, she turned on James who still sat, seemingly unable to intervene. ‘James are you going to seriously sit there and allow this to happen?’