Fourth Attempt

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Wasn’t it?’ George said weakly, unable to find the words to protest.

  The little woman opened her eyes widely, surprised at George’s ignorance. ‘Of course not,’ she said reprovingly. ‘Let them do what they want because they like it and you never know where it might end. Look at the evil the sad lost child fell into doing what she didn’t care for. Imagine how she would have been if she had enjoyed the work God sent her to do!’

  George blinked. ‘Aren’t you happy in what you do, Mrs — ah, Deborah?’ she said.

  The other woman beamed at her. ‘I am happy in the Work of the Lord, of course I am,’ she said. She took a deep, satisfied breath. ‘Oh, yes, bliss is the Work of the Lord. I had an evil past, when I danced and wanted to sing wicked songs, but I learned! Ernest taught me better.’ And she turned her head to look at the man in the other armchair.

  He had not spoken again since that first sentence, and now George said tentatively, ‘Do you agree it was best to — to prevent Pamela from doing the work she wanted to do? From being a musician?’

  ‘He doesn’t agree or disagree with the Lord!’ Mrs Frean said in shocked tones, as though George had asked him to strip off in public. ‘Such an idea!’

  George tried again. ‘Mr Frean,’ she said, looking at him very directly in an effort to make eye contact and trying to turn a shoulder against Mrs Frean. ‘Did you get the same message from the — the Lord when you prayed about what Pamela could do?’

  He lifted his hands again in that confused don’t-let-it-come-near-me gesture he had made when she had first spoken to him and shook his head. ‘I don’t remember. What the Lord says, the Lord does,’ he muttered.

  George began to feel anger rising in her. So far the whole conversation had had a dreamlike quality, but now her mind sharpened. ‘It would help me get a clearer picture of what happened to your daughter if I can persuade you both to give me a little more sound information. Not about the Lord and what happened when you prayed but —’

  ‘The only thing that is sound is what happens when we pray,’ Deborah Frean said. ‘If you don’t understand that about us, you understand nothing.’

  George bit her lip, trying to get her words clear in her head before she spoke them. Then she took a deep breath and tried. ‘I need to know: if you had discovered your daughter was pregnant, if she had told you, would you have disowned her?’

  There was a short silence and then it was Ernest Frean who broke it. ‘Disown her? Our Pamela? Of course we wouldn’t. We would have prayed with her and worked with her and done all we could to take her away from the evil she had suffered, but we would never have disowned her. She was our Pamela.’

  ‘The Lord’s Pamela,’ his wife said almost crisply. ‘Lent to us by the Lord. And we would never act against the Lord in such a matter. Of course we would not have disowned her, not if by that you mean thrown her out or something.’ The sudden ordinariness of her language was almost shocking, and made George look back at the little woman who was staring at her, blinking mildly. ‘You don’t understand us at all, do you?’ she said in a conversational way again, and actually smiled. ‘Poor thing, you just don’t understand us at all.’

  ‘I don’t think I do,’ George said. ‘Did Pamela?’

  Deborah Frean frowned, puzzled, and George tried again, picking her words as delicately as collecting snowdrops.

  ‘Did she think you’d disown her? Punish her, if you knew? Would she be afraid of you and what you might do?’

  ‘Frightened? Of us? But we loved her! Of course not’

  ‘But she killed herself,’ George said, wanting it to be gentle, but knowing it came out brutally. ‘For fear of you — and the religion you’d taught her.’

  Deborah’s face, for the first time, showed real distress. Her soft, smooth cheeks crumpled and her mouth twisted. ‘I still don’t believe it. I know it’s what they said, but I never believed it. We didn’t even go to the inquest. Why should we? We’re a loving-kindness family with a loving-kindness Lord. We wouldn’t have harmed her.’

  ‘But how can you say that?’ George said. ‘Do you know what message she left when she — when she died?’

  ‘Whatever message she left, it makes no difference. We’d never have spurned her and neither would our dear Lord.’ And she set her hands together in the classic praying position and, as casually as though she had kicked off her slippers, slid from her chair on to her knees. ‘Oh, Lord, forgive thy sad child who came to you too soon out of the sadness of her heart. Suffer her and her little one to know the beneficence of your kind protection …’ Her voice sank to a low murmur and she went on in a soft mutter George couldn’t distinguish. All she could do was sit there and stare at the praying figure as the doubt that had been sown in her now began to grow and flourish.

  She didn’t wait for the woman to finish her prayer. She just said loudly, ‘No, you wouldn’t have hurt her when she came home to you, would you? You wouldn’t have beaten her, or —’

  The woman opened her eyes, looked at George over her clasped hands and then got to her feet, brushed her knees down and sat back in her chair in a state of complete composure. ‘Of course not. I keep telling you. And Pamela knew that perfectly well. We’d have had some prayers and a bit of crying, no doubt, but no more than there’d be in any other family who hadn’t seen the light. Not so much, perhaps, seeing we understand the Lord’s hand is in action, whatever we puny creatures may do. And then we’d have set to work to be ready for a new little soul for God.’ Her lips curved, and for the first time George could see regret in her expression. ‘It’d have been a joy to me to have another little soul to love, but there it is. The Lord chose to let my Pamela set hands on herself and take that babe with her to Paradise. I can’t grieve for them when I know they’re under the Lord’s wing, but we miss her, Ernest and me. We miss her ever so much.’

  George didn’t wait for Gus to come home, but went to Ratcliffe Street to see him. They were used to her now, and nodded her past the duty desk and on through to the station proper. She ran up the stairs to the incident room and pushed her way in past the clutter of desks to Gus’s inner office.

  But he wasn’t there. She stood on the threshold for a moment, balked, trying to decide what to do next, and jumped slightly as a hand came down on her shoulder from behind.

  ‘You’re lookin’ a touch put out, Dr B.’

  She whirled. ‘Oh, Mike. I didn’t expect — Are you working on this case?’

  ‘Cases,’ Michael Urquhart said, jerking his head over his shoulder to indicate the big office behind him. ‘Would you like some coffee while we wait for himself to get back?’

  ‘Might as well,’ she said. ‘Will he be long, do you think?’

  Urquhart shrugged. ‘Who can say? You know how the Guv’nor is. Plays his cards —’

  ‘— close to his chest,’ George said. ‘Yeah. Tell me about it.’

  ‘Well, he’s been gey busy, I’ll tell you that much.’ Mike fetched the coffee from the machine in the corner and she sat on the edge of his desk to sip at it. ‘He had two of us with him when we went over to the Medical Records department at the hospital —’

  She brightened. ‘Ah! So that’s in hand? Great’

  ‘Oh, indeed it is. And the whole hospital going mad with excitement, too. I’ve had yon Sheila on the phone to me twice already with her questions.’

  ‘I’d threaten to kill her,’ George said furiously, ‘if it wasn’t such a dangerous thing to do. Shit, Mike, does that woman never know when to shut up?’

  ‘Oh, she means no harm,’ Mike said hurriedly, embarrassed at having dropped one of George’s staff into trouble. ‘And it’s understandable, after all, when you think what she’s been through. If Lamark hadna’ asked Sheila to get out her path, results for her, she mightn’t be dead, or that’s what Sheila thinks. So when she calls, I —’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’ George shook her head. ‘Though why she should think so I’m not sure. I’ve looked up the original
report, and there’s nothing odd about it as far as I can see. Just a routine blood sugar, a bit on the high side but nothing to alarm a lifelong diabetic who knows how to handle her illness.’

  ‘You never can tell how people react to information about their health,’ Mike said a shade sententiously. ‘Maybe it meant something to her — Lally, I mean — that it doesna’ mean to anyone else.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ George said. ‘And as for Sheila, it’s just that she has this gift for making me mad. Well, all right. What progress has there been? If, that is, I’m allowed to ask. Or does Sheila get the info while I’m left to wait for Gus?’

  ‘Oh, no need to get all sardonic with me, Dr B.! Of course you can hear where we’re at. Now, let me see.’ He sat down at his desk and began to leaf through his notes. ‘We went to Old East this morning, collected the property of Ms Lally Lamark from her locker, together with sundry other items of possible evidence from the changing room.’ He made a face. ‘Including some very nasty comestibles.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the sandwiches. I doubt there’ll be much in them for us to work on.’

  ‘Well, it’s up to you. They were sent over to your lab late this morning, together with the insulin pen. It’s been finger-printed and there’s nothing on it, or on anything else, come to that. All the prints there were so old and so muddled …’ He shook his head. ‘The print lads were fair sickened when they’d done all the work. Not a thing to be shown for it.’

  ‘Who’d be fingerprints?’ George said in mock sympathy. ‘OK, I’ll go back to Old East soon and start on them. Meanwhile —’

  He understood at once. ‘Meanwhile, he’s gone to see what’s what about Tony Mendez. He took DC Hagerty with him, and we’re just waiting till they get back. But he told me he reckoned there was some villainy there too, so I left some space.’ He indicated over his shoulder to the big white formica-covered boards on the walls. One of them was headed ‘Lally Lamark’ and the one beside it ‘Tony Mendez’. ‘He wouldna’ have asked me to do that if he wasna’ pretty certain he had a case.’

  ‘Well.’ She got to her feet. ‘When he does get back, if I don’t see him first, tell him you can get another one ready. For Pamela Frean. Because I no longer think she was a suicide.’

  She left him staring after her as she went, which cheered her up considerably, though she had no idea why it should.

  She pulled Jerry out of the main lab to help her with the work on the insulin pen and the sandwiches.

  ‘I know this is outside our usual area of work, Jerry,’ she said. ‘But I told Gus we could do it here, rather than send it to the main forensic lab. I need you to help be sure I flag up all the evidence, and also to establish the chain of evidence. So, let’s get down to it.’

  He grinned happily at her. ‘I’m beginning to feel important,’ he said. ‘This is the second time today I’ve been asked to do something forensic’

  ‘Eh?’ She stared at him. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, Gus was here about an hour ago.’

  She lifted her chin in surprise. ‘An hour ago? But —’

  ‘He asked for you,’ Jerry said quickly. ‘Believe me, it was you he wanted. But no one knew exactly where you were so we couldn’t help.’

  ‘Shit.’ She shook her head in irritation. ‘I went to Ratcliffe Street first instead of coming straight back here. If I had —’

  ‘You’d have caught him. Anyway, no harm done. Unless you don’t want me to do what he asked to have done.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘He wanted an assay on this.’ He went over to his bench and brought her a bottle of vodka, or rather the remains of one. It had a shabby label, which suggested it was used to being refilled time and again, and the neck had been chipped. As Jerry held it up, she could see an inch or so of clear liquid at the bottom.

  ‘He said I needn’t worry about fingerprints, all that had been dealt with. He just needs to know what’s in the bottle. So I said I would check it. I was just about to start when you called me.’

  She frowned, thinking hard. ‘How long will that take, do you think? I’d reckon an hour or so, depending on what he asked for.’

  ‘Just a general look,’ Jerry said. ‘No suggestions, no questions.’

  ‘OK. That means — Well, look, let’s get going on it. I’ll start on the insulin pen and then the sandwiches. I don’t expect to get much out of them, they’re just very elderly. But I have to check ’em, since Gus asked. I’ll do the pen first.’

  They worked in amiable silence for the rest of the afternoon. George was well content to find, now she could inspect the insulin pen under controlled conditions with a well-lit system of enlargement, that her initial judgement on the way it had been handled was accurate. A piece of the ratchet that controlled the amount of insulin it would deliver via the needle when the plunger was pushed fully home had been deliberately bitten off. She could clearly see the damage inflicted, she suspected, by a very small pair of pliers. ‘The sort opticians use,’ she murmured aloud.

  ‘Mmm?’ said Jerry, equally absorbed by his rack of test tubes, in which the vodka was being checked, step by step.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Tell you later.’ The silence rolled back interrupted only by the faint clink of glassware and the occasional click of the shutter of George’s camera as she recorded her findings.

  The sandwich checks took rather longer than the pen had done. She needed to test for various obvious poisons, as well as setting up culture dishes to test for bacterial infections, which would take rather longer to give a result, but by six o’clock she was pretty sure she had a picture of what she had been looking at.

  ‘Dead, very elderly dead sandwiches,’ she said aloud, straightening her back. ‘That’s all these are, I swear. No hint of poison deliberately added. Just the sort of visible ending of putrefaction you’d expect. They were good sandwiches, though. Once. Cottage cheese and watercress, lettuce and tuna on granary bread, which suggests that they were indeed Lally’s because from all accounts that was a very health-conscious lady. Low fat, high fibre would definitely have been her bag.’

  ‘But is that evidence?’ Jerry said, squinting at the last of his test tubes. ‘Isn’t that what they call circumstantial?’

  ‘Not even that,’ George said gloomily. ‘It’s barely admissable at all.’

  ‘Ah,’ Jerry said sympathetically. ‘This here, though —’

  But she overrode him. ‘It’s different with the pen. That’s real evidence. Someone deliberately broke off a piece of the ratchet that controls the dosage. She must have given herself twice what she thought she had.’

  ‘And that would have been enough to kill her?’ Jerry said. ‘Unless she realized she was getting hypoglycaemic and took some sugar or food to counteract it. Why didn’t she?’

  ‘Because human insulin kicks in faster than pig insulin. She was probably knocked over sooner than she expected and just wasn’t fit to get to the sandwiches she had ready to eat. It makes it clear this was murder, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it?’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t ask me. I’m not much up on what is or isn’t evidence. Though this here —’

  She didn’t hear him. ‘If only there had been some usable fingerprints to indicate who had handled the damned thing,’ she said. ‘As it is, we haven’t any pointers at all to who might have interfered with the pen. It’ll all have to be worked out by the police checking for windows of opportunity and all that stuff. It takes so long that way — if it uncovers anyone at all, that is. It’s hard evidence you need, dammit. And this just isn’t hard enough.’

  ‘Maybe this is, then,’ Jerry said mildly. ‘Seeing it’s been spiked to within an inch of its life.’

  This time she heard him. ‘What?’

  ‘The vodka,’ Jerry said with obvious patience. ‘It’s been spiked with absolute alcohol. The sort of trick crazy medical students used to get up to. Only, much, much worse. Anyone drinking even a mouthful of this would have been knocked for six i
n a matter of minutes. The question is, where did Gus get it from?’

  28

  ‘Where did I get it from?’ Gus echoed. ‘The obvious place. Tony Mendez’s hidey-hole. His locker. I thought, seeing what we’d found in Lally’s, it was the obvious place to start.’

  He had come back to the flat at shortly after eight, by which time George had had a chance to write up a brief account of her work on the insulin pen and the sandwiches, to attach to the report that Jerry had given her on the vodka. He was barely in the door before she jumped on him with a flurry of questions.

  ‘His locker? Do you mean — Gus, that vodka, according to Jerry’s assays, had enough absolute alcohol in it to kill an ox.’

  ‘Ah!’ He sounded deeply satisfied as he dumped the three plastic bags he was carrying on to the kitchen table. ‘Had it, by God! Look, I’ve brought some Chinese to save time over supper. Noodles and the lotus fried rice, some prawns, some chili beef and —’

  ‘Oh, Gus, forget your stomach for once, please!’ She was in a fever of impatience. ‘Tell me all about it. Every word. All you can think of.’

  He sighed a little theatrically. ‘I tell you what, you go and make a pot of tea — jasmine’ll be best — and I’ll set this stuff out and we’ll eat it while it’s hot. You know how yuk it is if you have to reheat it. And when I’ve got my chopsticks in my hand I’ll tell you every last detail. I promise. But I need some supper to loosen my tongue.’

  In this mood there was no arguing with him, she knew, so she scurried around the kitchen making the tea and collecting the little porcelain bowls and matching cups Gus had bought for her last year and insisted on using when he brought in a Chinese takeaway, and the ivory chopsticks he’d stolen years ago from a Soho restaurant that had served him indifferent egg foo yong for which he had reckoned he was entitled to a discount, even if he had to help himself to it. And once they were settled at the kitchen table, perching on high stools, he beamed at her, and with his mouth full of bean sprouts, began to talk at last.