Fourth Attempt

by Claire Rayner

  She started with Hattie in A & E, or tried to; but Hattie was off duty, and there was no way George could ask for access to her computer and its records without making everyone in the department very suspicious and therefore likely to invent and spread rumours with great enthusiasm. There had to be another route.

  She tried Laburnum, the neurology ward, next. That had been where Pam Frean was working. Maybe one of her colleagues there would have some idea of where the girl’s parents lived? But she’d have to be tactful in her enquiries.

  It wasn’t till she reached Laburnum and smelled again that familiar odour of hopelessness and helplessness, that compound of long-ago cooked food, antiseptics and tired, out-of-order human bodies that was the essence of the place that she remembered: not once in her previous visits here had she considered the fact that Pam Frean had worked here. She made a little face at herself as the realization slipped into her mind; maybe that was really why she committed suicide. Who wouldn’t if they had to spend all day on Laburnum? But she pushed the idea away as frivolous, and went wandering in search of a nurse. And, of course, found Zack instead.

  He was clearly delighted to see her. He was in one of the bays, doing something with one of the patients, a bulky old woman who was lying on her back staring blankly up at Zack as he leaned over her. She had her nightdress bunched under her chin, and seemed as oblivious to her nakedness as everyone around her. That made George feel quite dreadful, at some deep level, though for the life of her she could not have explained why. So she pushed the awareness away and refused to contemplate it. Zack had been listening to the old woman’s chest, but when he caught sight of George at the entrance to the bay he lifted his chin and almost waved his stethoscope at her, as well as beaming from ear to ear.

  ‘Well, hello! What can we do for you today? We’re not used to seeing such illustrious personages as yourself in our gloomy groves!’ He sounded exhilarated, and she could not prevent herself from grinning back at him. His good humour was infectious.

  ‘Nothing important,’ she lied. ‘I’m just sorting out a few details about some of my past cases. Just to get my files straight again, you know. They were in a bit of a mess.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said and nodded. ‘Your break-in. The bastards.’

  ‘Oh, doctor!’ The old woman in the bed startled them all. The words came out of her huskily as though her throat had gone rusty from years of silence. ‘Language, language!’

  ‘If you never hear worse than that, Mrs Elgar, then you’ll be doing very nicely’ Zack bent over her again. ‘I’ve heard you say worse with my own ears and don’t you deny it.’ As the old woman cackled delightedly Zack looked over his shoulder at George and said, ‘Can you give me a few minutes? I’ll be out as soon as I can. Don’t run away.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she promised, and turned gratefully away to hurry up the outer corridor to the nurses’ station where at last she could see a nurse had arrived. With a bit of luck and a tolerably fast-acting nurse, she’d get what she wanted before he came out. It was important to her that no one should know what she was up to.

  The nurse looked blank and then shook her head in response to George’s succinct enquiry. ‘I only know she had a flat somewhere — well, more of a room, I think it was. She never talked much about her family or anything. Afraid I can’t help you.’

  ‘Damn,’ George said under her breath and hesitated, unsure what to do next.

  The nurse, who had returned to her paperwork, looked up and made a face indicating sympathy. ‘You could ask ’em in HR,’ she said. ‘They might have it. Or maybe OH.’

  George looked, blinked and translated. ‘HR? Oh, Human Resources. And — ?’

  ‘Occupational Health. Those two know most about our backgrounds. I mean, they don’t tell everyone what they want to know but if you’ve got a good reason — and she is dead, poor thing, after all …’ She returned seriously to her paperwork now and George turned to go, grateful for the ideas.

  ‘Thanks, nurse, and please tell Dr Zacharius I had to go off, will you? On an urgent call.’

  ‘Will do,’ the girl said absently, and George escaped, hurrying to make sure Zack couldn’t follow her. There was no reason why he shouldn’t know what she was after; but the one thing she didn’t want was him to offer to accompany her on her searches. She knew that once he got such a notion into his head it would be hard to dislodge; and this was definitely something she’d have to do alone.

  It was a particularly new young clerk in HR who helped her. She looked anxious when George asked cautiously to see Nurse Pamela Frean’s file.

  ‘We’re not supposed to show them except to the right people,’ she said, giggling a little. ‘Confidential — confidentiality, you see. It’s very important.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ George said heartily. ‘And I’m delighted you understand that so well. But that rule applies to people who have no right to access. I have. I’m part of the team who cared for Nurse Frean, you see.’

  It was only a small lie, just a minor deviation from the straight line, she thought. She was a little ashamed to have used it on so inexperienced a person, for the girl’s face cleared, and she said with relief, ‘Oh, that’s all right then! I’ll go and get the file,’ and went trotting away.

  It didn’t take more than a few minutes to find their address. There they were, listed under Next-of-Kin in the application form. Mr and Mrs Ernest Frean, and an address way off in Harrow Weald, in the far north-west of London. She made a face as she scribbled the details on the back of her hand. It would take ages to get out there. But get there she would have to.

  She took the file back to the clerk, who received it gratefully, and then went as fast as she could — almost in order, she realized, to prevent herself from changing her mind — out to the car park. She’d need to fill up with petrol; I’ll get the man to do it, she thought, while I look up the route. It can’t take all that long. And Jerry and Sheila can cope.

  It was, on the map, not too bad a journey. She just had to cross London to get herself on to the Euston Road, head steadily west and north out along Marylebone Road on to the Westway motorway, thence to Western Avenue on through Wembley, and finally veer off due north to Harrow and beyond it, Harrow Weald. Argos Road, she noted, was just on the far edge of what was clearly a great suburban sprawl. No wonder Pam Frean hadn’t lived at home as she might have been expected to with her attitude to life; it was so far from the hospital. She might as well have been in Bombay as Harrow, the journey was so tedious.

  It took George almost an hour and a half of cursing wheel-wrenching finger-tapping irritability to get through the crawling traffic and the stink of diesel and oil fumes as the sun beat down hotter than ever, baking the car into a private inferno. I must be out of my cotton-pickin’ mind, she thought furiously. A nickel gets you a dollar they’ll be out when I get there and it’ll all have been for nothing. But she couldn’t have phoned first to make an appointment, because they didn’t have a phone. It said so in Pam’s employment folder. Probably didn’t believe in such an instrument of the devil, George reflected sourly, hooting furiously as a black cab deliberately blocked her access to the only bit of free road she’d seen since she left the hospital.

  She reached Argos Road just after noon. The street was tight packed with houses, and narrow, with cars parked on each side leaving barely enough space in the middle of the road for two vehicles to pass each other. There was much jockeying for position, she saw, as people tried to find yet more spaces to park, so she made no attempt to find the house itself and park outside. She just looked at the numbers and when she estimated she was within a dozen or so houses of her destination, turned into a cross street, and there, crowded though it was, managed to find a space for her old Citroën.

  She began to sweat as soon as she got out of the car and locked it. The sun burned on her neck and she yearned for a hat. The trees planted at intervals along the road offered no shade; each of them had a thick and sturdy trunk but — becau
se they had been pollarded to within an inch of their lives — had only an absurd crop of dispirited leaves on top, so that they all looked like meagre lollipops, almost too small to bother to suck. Again she cursed herself for coming so far for what would almost certainly prove to be a proverbial goose chase.

  But it wasn’t. Number 357, Argos Road was a neat end-of-terrace house, with carefully white-painted walls in which the windows, each one heavily mullioned and mitre-topped as though they adorned a massive gothic pile somewhere in the depths of the country, looked ill at ease. There was a tiny patch of front garden filled with scrubby grass and a couple of weary bushes flanked by a neatly clipped privet hedge with a gate in it. The front door was painted dark green and a basket of flowers — geraniums, alyssum and a trail of ivy — dangled from a screw eye in the lintel of the miniscule porch that enclosed it. The place looked ordinary and cared for, a home that was important to its inhabitants. It was not at all what she had expected, though she couldn’t for the life of her have said what she had thought she’d find.

  There was no doorbell, so she had to use a knocker to make her presence known, which sounded thick and muffled beyond the door. She waited hopelessly, sure she would get no response, and in consequence was startled when the door opened silently, particularly as she had heard no footsteps from the interior.

  A man stood there, tall and stooped, with thin sandy hair sleeked across a narrow skull and rather watery green eyes that peered at her over glasses. He was, in spite of the heat, wearing a thick cardigan over a shirt and collar and tie, and had heavy carpet slippers on his feet.

  She had been so certain no one would be there that she wasn’t as ready as she should have been with a greeting; and after a moment she heard herself saying, ‘Ah, Mr Frean? I’m Dr Barnabas. From Old East — I mean, the Royal Eastern Hospital. Could I have a few words with you about your daughter Pamela?’

  For a moment she thought he was going to push the door closed in her face, so she stepped forwards. But he just stepped back a pace of his own, put both of his hands in the air and waved them about in a disconnected, helpless sort of way. She could now see that his face had gone white with shock, and was filled with compunction. ‘Oh, I am so sorry! I must have startled you. I didn’t mean to, it’s just that I — here — hold on there …’

  The man was swaying and his eyes had rolled back horribly. She only just had time to catch him as his knees buckled. She held on hard.

  ‘Ernest?’ A childlike little voice came shrilly out from the back of the house. ‘Ernest, who is it, dear? Anyone for me?’

  ‘Er — Hi, there’ George called, needing to make the woman hear, but unwilling to shout and cause any alarm. ‘I’m afraid Mr Frean isn’t feeling too good.’

  He was heavier than his thin body made him look, and she had to lower him to the floor as carefully as she could; but then he began to come round, moaning softly but at least straightening his knees so that he stood more or less upright again. Behind him she could see a straight-backed chair set against one wall of the narrow hallway beside a hat stand, and she pushed him towards it gently, deeply grateful that he seemed to understand and let her lead him there. He collapsed on to it, to sit with his head drooping forwards, and a hand on each knee, breathing rather noisily.

  She was about to reach down and check his pulse when the voice came again, behind her now, and she turned her head to see its owner. A small, thin woman — as thin as the man who was probably her husband; indeed they looked somewhat alike physically, for she too had wispy sandy hair and a drooping expression — stared back at her and then flicked her eyes at the man in the chair.

  ‘What have you done?’ she cried accusingly at George. She flopped on her knees beside the man and began to rub one of his hands between both of her own. ‘Ernest dear, do give over. No need to take on so, I’m sure it’s all right. What did you say to him?’ She looked fiercely over her shoulder at George. And now George saw that she wasn’t as old as she had seemed at first glance; forty-five or so at most, rather than the sixty plus she had appeared. She flicked her gaze at the man, who was now clearly feeling better. He had lifted his head and his colour had returned. He was about the same age as the little woman; it was his demeanour and his clothes that had made him look so elderly.

  ‘I’m truly sorry Mrs Frean,’ George said quietly ‘It is Mrs Frean, isn’t it? I’m truly sorry to have alarmed your husband. I came out on an impulse, frankly, and wasn’t sure you’d be here. And when he answered the door, I suppose I was a bit startled and said the wrong thing.’

  ‘The Lord brings peace to the honest house,’ the little woman said, shaking her head severely at George. She got to her feet, brushing down her skirts as she did so. She was wearing an apron tied with a big bow at the back, and looked like a biscuit advertisement from the 1950s. ‘And that was what Ernest — Mr Frean here — expected. If you said something unpeaceful to him it would have come as a shock.’

  The words, though odd, were spoken in a perfectly normal tone of voice and they made George blink.

  ‘So, what did you say to him? I hope it was nothing blasphemous or evil.’ She spoke in the same tone she might have used if she were scolding a door-to-door brush salesman for using a mild profanity.

  ‘Er, no,’ George said. ‘It was just …’ She took a deep breath. She’d have to risk doing it again. How else could she get any benefit out of this long journey? ‘I told him I’d come to speak to him about his daughter, Pamela Frean.’

  There was a long silence as the woman turned her head to look thoughtfully at her husband and then, oddly, at the fingernails on her right hand, turning them up to herself and then buffing them with her other hand in a totally unself-conscious way, rather as a child would.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. She let her arms drop at her side. ‘I dare say you’d better come along in, then. And you, Ernest. No need to sit there like that. It’ll do you less harm to get on with it. In the house the Lord has blessed no evil can befall; and we’re still indoors, so come along.’

  And she walked along the little hallway, opened a door to one side and held it open. ‘Will you come this way, if you please, miss. I’ll just put the kettle on as Ernest settles himself, then we can talk as is necessary.’

  27

  When Ernest Frean spoke it came as a shock to George. She had been sitting there for half an hour while Mrs Frean (‘You can call me Deborah. She was a judge in Israel you know, and I’m proud to bear her honourable name’) spoke about her lost daughter as the tea on the tray between them cooled, untasted. ‘She was never a wicked girl,’ he said, his voice a plaintive sound in the excessively tidy room. ‘Evilly lead and evilly treated but never wicked.’ And George realized that these were the first words he had uttered since they had met. He had been sitting there in the neat armchair to the left of the old-fashioned fireplace, his head bent and his gaze directed downwards at the brightly coloured carpet while Mrs Frean talked. And talked and talked.

  It had been a flood, a cascade of words which were oddly unaccented as though she were speaking of something as trivial as the weather.

  ‘We reared our child in the eyes of the Lord, to be a credit to Zion and her people, and we taught her the right way to be, but we couldn’t prepare her for the wickedness of others who do not walk in the Lord’s way, because we do not think or speak as such people do. So it stands to reason when she met with plain wickedness she didn’t know its face,’ she said, looking at George with her eyes wide and bright beneath a smooth, apparently untroubled forehead and thin but not too lined cheeks. There was a certainty about her that every word she uttered was the plain unvarnished and self-evident truth that George found chilling.

  She had to an extent grown up with fundamental religion. Her mother’s family had been stern free-thinkers who maintained that all their views, which included a deep dislike of foreigners, city-dwellers and pushy women who didn’t know their place — a category which included George and her mother — were based on
what George had always considered a very skewed vision of the meaning of the Bible. So Mrs Frean came as no surprise. George recognized in her the same sublime self-assurance that had been so infuriating in her relatives. It should have been easy to shrug her off as another blinkered self-deluding jackass, which was one of the milder epithets a young George had hurled at her much-loathed uncles, but it was not.

  For a start, Mrs Frean had none of the passion that had so illuminated the speech George used to hear from her despised relatives when younger. That was what had most alarmed her about their bigotry. But Mrs Frean was different. Ordinary, everyday, a picture-book version of a sensible housewife, albeit one that belonged to the fifties rather than the nineties, she sat with her hands folded on her apron, her head set to one side like an eager puppy, speaking in a way that made all her twisted thinking sound horribly, dangerously, normal.

  ‘We prayed hard and long over her ministry and work. We thought at first that God had intended her to teach the young. Then we would have been able to keep her here to ready her for her tasks, and she wouldn’t have met the evil that she did. But God meant otherwise. He instructed us to send her to a hospital to learn to care for the sick and to minister to the souls of the dying.’ She shook her head and then went on as though what she was saying were the most usual thing in the world. ‘She had had this devil’s notion in her head, you see, about learning music, and we thought — God told us to think — that if she was allowed to be a teacher she might think it right to learn music so that she could teach it to the young. She liked music too much. It wasn’t fitting to let her do something she wanted to so much, was it?’