She buried her face in her hands. Her body shook with sobs. “You don’t know what I’ve been through.”
Gabriel was silent. He could think of nothing to say. It was a confusing and depressing reflection that this heartless and cold-blooded woman elicited no sympathy from him. And yet there were real tears in her eyes.
“Are they going to arrest him?”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I’m sorry to have upset you.”
She did not reply. He had an uncomfortable feeling that his words sounded insincere. He rose to leave, but before moving away spoke to her in a low voice, genuinely wishing to give good advice,
“I strongly recommend that Mr Hewitt tells the police the entire truth about his movements the evening Anna was murdered—”
It was then she suddenly exploded, removing any veneer of politeness or control in her voice.
“Get out, get out. Get out of my house, you prick,” she screamed in fury. “You fucking...”
Gabriel was completely taken aback. She was angry with him, angry with everyone, but most of all she was angry with herself.
He set off to drive back to the hospital. He did not take the direct route via the ring road but kept going toward the city. The striped awnings of the shops in Summertown slipped by as in a dream. Suddenly he turned down the street where Hewitt had pointed out to him Taylor’s flat. There was no reason he should expect Matt Taylor to be home at that time but if he was there then so much the better: he would finally have it out with him about the palindrome results.
The North Oxford street where he parked his car had a few pretty terrace houses with brightly coloured front doors but most had been pulled down to make way for a development of modern flats. Gabriel looked at the names on the bells and located that of “A & M Taylor”. The street door buzzed to let him in and he went up the stairs to the flat.
He knocked. The door opened almost immediately and he found himself face to face with Liz Reynolds.
Gabriel’s astonishment was too great to permit him to observe whether she too was astonished. For a thunderstruck moment he tried to find a gesture, a word that would conceal his emotion.
When his faculties were restored to some sort of balance he could only say, “Hello Liz, I was looking for Matt Taylor.”
“You’d better come in.”
“Is it all right?” he thought best to ask first. He had a feeling that he was interrupting a lover’s tryst. Where was Taylor? Was he hiding in the bedroom? Did Liz live here as well? Or was she merely a visitor? It was an improbable scene from an improbable melodrama.
Liz answered one of his unspoken questions before he could ask it aloud. “Matt has gone with the police to the station. They want to question him again.”
“Couldn’t they do that here?”
“Apparently not. I didn’t tell you this morning but Brook and one of his henchmen questioned me last night about where I was the evening Anna was murdered. I told them that I was at the hospital and then the college but they don’t seem to like the fact I don’t have any witnesses to account for my movements at the time.”
“Gearing told me that you almost knocked him over that evening when you cycled in to the car park at the college. You were in a great hurry.”
“I was. I was late.”
“And Melanie told me that she couldn’t find you when she wanted your opinion on a biopsy.” The two of them looked at each other. “So where were you?”
“I wasn’t anywhere other than I said. I went from the hospital on my bike to the college. I was running late so that was why I was in such a rush when I reached the college. I must have just missed Melanie. No one saw me leave the hospital and only Gearing saw me when I arrived at the college.” She looked at Gabriel who seemed to be studying her in the same way he did a microscope slide. “For God’s sake, I was on my bicycle and it was dark. How could anyone have seen me?”
“But you know what Brook thinks, don’t you, Liz? That Matt Taylor and you somehow conspired to murder Anna; that you cycled out to Nebotec before you went to the college.”
There was a silence. Gabriel was not certain whether Liz was telling the truth or not. The situation was ridiculous as well as painful.
“Perhaps you’d prefer me to go?” he offered.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course not. Sit down.”
He remained standing, as she did, with one of her thighs angled against the edge of the sofa. She almost stamped her foot in anger before her next words.
“It was Matt you came to see, wasn’t it?”
Gabriel nodded.
“How did you know he lived here?”
“Hewitt pointed out the flat to me when I drove him home from the college the other night.”
“So that was what the college dinner was all about?” There was a hint of betrayal in her voice. “What have you come here for?”
He had no thought other than to speak the truth. “I don’t know exactly. It’s all rather complicated. I wanted to ask him about palindromes—”
She interrupted him. “Yes, yes, but what were you going to do with Matt?”
“Do with him?” Gabriel wiped some moisture off his forehead. He felt a desperate desire to fill out the skeleton of the conversation. “Look, this is all too absurd. Why can’t you be frank with me? What is all this about?”
“You tell me.”
He saw almost with alarm that his appeal had not made the least impression on her.
As though humouring a fractious child, she said, “Why don’t you forget about all this, Adam?”
“Forget what? That you might have helped Matt Taylor—”
“Helped him do what?” she interrupted.
“Now it’s my turn to say ‘You tell me.’ I think I’d better go.”
He made a move to go. He suddenly seemed to think better of it and stopped himself. “My advice to the two of you is that you’d better have a good answer to what you were doing that night. My guess is that Brook has a witness who saw you at Nebotec the night Anna was murdered.”
“You know that for certain?”
“Almost certain.”
“But why would I have gone there?”
“Because Matt and you have a patent on MT-1. I would hazard a guess that there’s not a lot of difference in the molecular structure between MT-1 and PLF, which Nebotec are now trumpeting as a newly discovered molecule.”
Liz looked down. She shook her head. “You’re wrong, Adam. You don’t know the half of it.”
Gabriel felt a rush of pity for her. She was right. What did he know? Her character existed in terms beyond his understanding.
“You don’t know what I’ve been through.”
Gabriel went over and stood beside her at the window, watching her profile. He opened his mouth but did not know what to say.
Pat arrived home after Adam and promptly announced they were eating out as she had little in the fridge and was too tired to cook. Adam’s inability to cook meant that he could hardly object, though it was not what he desired after a long day. Pat made him feel that he was somehow responsible; that with some effort and a little instruction it could have been avoided. She gave him a look that condemned him to the status of a child demanding to be fed.
In his defence he essayed a bogus reply, “It’ll be a nice change,” but it fooled no one.
Their car drove out of Boarstall under an endless black cloud that did not take long to deliver the heavy rain it promised. The clicking windscreen wipers struggled to make two clear geometrical arcs through the pounding rain. The car turned off the main road onto a single track road which ran over a narrow railway bridge then climbed up a steep hill to a village that overlooked two valleys. A thick wood fringed a row of stone cottages along the main street where, in imitation of the suburbia the villagers had no doubt hoped to escape, a long row of cars and vans was parked half on the road, half on the pavement.
The village was unlit apart from a light above the sign of a stone a
nd thatch pub opposite the church. A fire blazed inside the pub which was largely empty, probably on account of the beastly weather. A red-faced man of the wealthy agricultural kind was drinking a pint at the bar and muttering to the dark-haired landlady who looked as if she was barely listening.
Gabriel ordered drinks at the bar and a short time later the landlady brought a pint of beer and large glass of wine to their table. He thanked her and asked, “Are you serving food tonight?”
“What we’ve got is all up on the board.” She pointed to a blackboard behind the bar on which was scribbled in chalk a handful of alternatives (all with chips). Last on the list was an optimistic request to “Ask for our Special”.
Anticipating Gabriel’s query, she added with a shrug of her shoulders, “The Special is game pie.”
“What game pie?” asked Gabriel doubtfully.
“Bit of everything, you know.”
The two of them chose steak and asked for mushrooms and salad. (Chips was nearly the dirtiest word in Pat’s vocabulary.) The landlady looked offended they had not taken her recommendation. The cynic in Gabriel reckoned that was because the pie was proving hard to shift and would appear on the menu again tomorrow. She shuffled off and did not acknowledge their faint thanks.
“Why does she never smile, Adam?” Pat asked.
“She runs a pub.”
“So, that’s no reason why she can’t be pleasant and polite.”
“In my experience few pub landlords are capable of being both at the same time.”
“In the old days she would have been classed as a witch.”
“I suspect along with a lot of other women. Be glad you live nowadays rather than in those enlightened, male-dominated times when just complaining would have qualified you as one.”
“Was that the worst crime?”
“No, not having a meal ready for your husband when he got home was a lot worse.”
“That’s not funny, you misogynist pig.” She put down her glass. “The wine here is almost undrinkable...” She was soon bombarding everything with criticism. She began with Adam then turned on her students. “None of them like their set texts, and even those that do, don’t seem to have understood them.”
“I presume that includes The Witch of Edmonton?”
“Most certainly.”
Gabriel regarded women as a different tribe. He had met a few women today — Frances Hewitt, Liz Reynolds and now Pat — none of whom he could be said to have properly understood. It was their vehement feelings of compassion, hatred, disgust — and their certainty about the truth of such feelings — that he did not comprehend. He could not think of a woman of his acquaintance who did not consciously or unconsciously think like that. Pat asked questions as though she already knew the answer. He did not. It was not that women were kinder, smarter, or more virtuous than men. They were just different. Perhaps it was the effect of that extra X chromosome. After all, if it could change the look of a cell nucleus why could it not also change personality?
Gabriel leaned back and looked through the window into the pub car park where the rain was bouncing in puddles. He saw a man in a white T-shirt, probably the cook, come out of a back door and light up a cigarette. The man looked out, spat into the yard, and went in again.
“Have you worked out what happened to Anna?”
“Not really. It’s all very confusing. There are some facts that have come to light but they don’t, for me at least, make complete sense.”
“Is that essential?”
“I suspect so in this case. Certainly, Anna’s murder was very carefully planned.”
Pat did not reply and Gabriel wondered what she was thinking. He observed with a self-conscious pathologist’s eye an elderly well-dressed couple seated at the next table. They spoke with strong Oxfordshire accents and looked as if they were ritually enjoying their food. Retired locals he imagined. Himself and Pat when they retired in a few years, he reflected with some dismay.
“I wonder if you’re right, Adam,” Pat said, verbalising her own thoughts. “About the murder, I mean. You said it was a very violent murder. That means whoever did it, must have really hated Anna. Hated her a lot.”
“But why?”
“Perhaps because she was like the witch of Edmonton. Not like others. She didn’t see things the way others did.”
“You may be right, certainly at Nebotec anyway,” he acknowledged before adding, smiling, “But you don’t kill someone just because you don’t see eye to eye with them. Otherwise a lot marriages, ours for instance, would be more bloody affairs.”
“I’d just like to see you try.” She laughed. “I wouldn’t feed you for a week.”
Chapter 19
Some men interpret nine memos
In the end it was Oxford in its usual negative and circumlocutory way that lent Gabriel a hand. The next day he drove in early, parked at his college and walked down to Gloucester Green to catch the London bus. He had to be in Bloomsbury before 9.00 to sit on a selection committee interviewing three candidates competing for a research fellowship in molecular biology — something he knew a little but not a lot about.
Town and gown had not yet stirred and the streets were almost deserted. His route took him through the centre of Oxford, down the Broad, past the college of Liz Reynolds, Gearing and Palmer. It was windy but bright and sunny. The sunshine cheered his soul but it did not entirely convince. From experience he knew that as usual, not long before midday, grey clouds would gather, bringing with them the rain that dampens everything.
As always, when faced with doing something outside his usual routine, Gabriel saw the future real by imagining it: first catching the bus to London, the single decker with its load of office workers and shop assistants; then the stop at Baker Street where he would get off; his walk across London through bustling pavements; his frosty reception by the building security officer who like a doubting Saint Peter would shake his head as he looked down the list of those expected before reluctantly ticking his name and issuing him with a plastic badge on which the word Visitor would be printed.
As he entered Gloucester Green he was greeted by something of a mini-cyclone that lashed his suit and upset his hair. The bus station of the city of dreaming spires was a couple of concrete football pitches surrounded by modern buildings. Footpaths pierced the perimeter of the “Green” beyond one of which there was a council parking lot. The sun shone crudely on the waddling fat pigeons doing battle over feeding territory; they were in no hurry to get out of Gabriel’s way and he had trouble avoiding them. Being a man who liked to live without big ideas, Gabriel preferred this side of Oxford. There was not that complacent assumption of know-all learning that he found in the grand college buildings only a short distance away; just the thick smell of people getting on with their lives, struggling to get from A to B.
He still had a little time before his bus was scheduled to leave. He felt thirsty and cast his eyes round the square. It was studded with the usual commodities of capitalism. He entered one of these, a featureless café, and emerged a minute later with a large paper cup. He sat down at a corner table — white plastic — and stirred his coffee as if it required all his concentration.
He watched a bus from London to Birmingham swing into a bay. The line of disembarking passengers blocked for a moment his view of the driver of the airport bus loading bags into the luggage bay at the side of the bus and the few passengers queuing obediently before the open bus door. The Birmingham bus took on a few passengers and then began to reverse out of its bay. A recorded stentorian male voice repeatedly cautioned: “This vehicle is reversing.”
He got up to board the London bus a few minutes later and looked round the square one last time. Perhaps it was at this moment that an idea which was not that new and certainly not an inspiration took hold of him; it was the kind, he recognised, that leads to diagnosis. It might be worth looking into when he got back in the afternoon. He paid for his Day Return ticket then sat down as the bus pulled awa
y.
It took longer than Gabriel expected to return from London. He was held up by London rush hour traffic which, in his estimation, seemed to begin earlier and end later every year: the beginning and end were now barely distinguishable. When he entered the Pathology laboratory he was surprised to find Brook there.
“I was just going to call you,” Gabriel said after greeting him. He began a half-hearted apology — it was not his fault, after all that his bus had got back late from London — but Brook was not interested. His face had the clenched stubborn expression of a rugby forward who has suddenly been passed the ball and is determined to run as far as possible with it.
“We’ve a few things to talk over,” he said tetchily. “Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”
“My office,” said Gabriel,
Brook led the way in long strides; he was one of those men who believe they are working hard when they are moving quickly. Joan looked up from her typing in near panic when the two men sped past her.
Gabriel closed his office door behind Brook then sat down behind his desk, facing him.
“You’ll appreciate that what I have to tell you is highly confidential,” Brook began, leaning back slightly in his chair. “Information has come to light that places a member of your staff at the Nebotec lab around the time of Anna Taylor’s murder.”
“I know from Liz Reynolds that you spoke to her yesterday.”
“But I haven’t come to see you about Dr Reynolds.”
“Then who?”
“Tom Duncan.”
There was a brief pause as Brook waited for Gabriel to respond. When he remained silent, he asked him, “When you came back from Madrid, the registrar, Dr Stokes, sought your diagnostic opinion on a case, did she not?”
Gabriel nodded.
“Did she mention anything else at the time?”
“Yes. She said that she received the slides the previous evening but that she couldn’t find Liz Reynolds or Tom Duncan to get their opinion.”
“That agrees with what Dr Stokes told us.”
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