by Frank Smith
Colour rose in Molly’s face. Suddenly she remembered a large envelope she’d been holding, and handed it to Paget. ‘Dr Starkie’s report on Antonia Halliday, sir,’ she said stiffly.
‘I worked with Reg on that,’ Chen said, ‘and I doubt if you will find much in there that you didn’t know already. In fact I can give you the main points right now in plain English if you wish.’
‘By all means, since we are all here,’ said Paget, ‘but are you sure we’re not keeping you from something?’
Chen shook his head. ‘As Molly said, I’m on holiday.’
So it’s Molly, is it? thought Paget as he studied Chen. There was an air of quiet competence and confidence about the man, and he would have to have both those attributes if he’d been working with Doctors without Borders. But his features . . . Suddenly the light went on. Of course! He was Ellen Starkie’s nephew, and Ellen was half Chinese herself, having met and married Reg Starkie during a stint in his younger days as a cruise ship’s doctor.’
‘There were two blows, both delivered from behind the victim,’ said Chen, breaking into Paget’s thoughts. ‘Although “slices” might be a better term in this case. The first came in at close to a forty-five degree angle, entering just below the right ear, slicing into the neck, cutting through the internal jugular and the carotid artery right down to the trachea, cutting across the lower part of the jaw as well.
‘The young woman would have died within very short order from that blow alone,’ he continued, ‘but apparently your killer wasn’t satisfied, because he or she finished off with a blow to the back of the skull with the point of the sickle – assuming that was the weapon used, and I don’t think there can be much doubt about it – penetrating deep into the parietal lobe. In fact it was delivered with such force that it split the skull. Both Reg and I believe the second blow was administered while the victim was on the floor more or less face down.
‘There was extensive bruising on the chest and upper arms, but the bruises were too far advanced to have been inflicted at the time of death.’
‘She was involved in a car accident earlier in the day,’ Paget said.
Chen nodded. ‘That could account for them, then,’ he said. ‘There was nothing to suggest there had been a struggle,’ he continued, ‘neither was there any indication of sexual activity or molestation. There were no external indications of drug use – needle tracks on her arms and legs, that sort of thing – but there was damage to the septum and mucous membrane and nasal cavity in general, suggesting that the victim had been using drugs for some time, and I imagine the toxicology report will confirm that. Her blood alcohol level was high – I’m afraid I forget the exact figure – but unless some other factor was involved, she could have been functioning more or less normally. Oh, yes, and she was approximately six weeks pregnant.
‘The estimated time of death,’ he concluded, ‘is between eight and nine last evening.’ Chen looked from one to the other. ‘Does that help?’ he asked.
‘It does indeed,’ said Paget, ‘and thank you very much, Mr Chen. But you’d better be careful or Reg will be wanting to take you on permanently himself.’
‘Not a chance,’ Chen said firmly. ‘Fascinating as it is, I prefer the living to the dead.’
‘As do I,’ said Paget. ‘It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr Chen, but I must be going. Are you waiting for Reg, or do you need a lift anywhere?’
‘The pleasure was mine,’ said Chen. ‘And Reg has already gone. He and Aunt Ellen are off to a friend’s anniversary dinner this evening, which is why I was the only one here when Molly arrived to pick up the report. So, thank you very much, but Molly has already offered to give me a lift.’
Has she, now? Tregalles thought, and, catching Molly’s eye, grinned and gave her a surreptitious thumbs up sign – and chuckled to himself when he saw colour flare in Molly’s face.
THIRTEEN
They were sitting down to dinner when the phone rang. ‘I’ll get it,’ said Grace, ‘and if it’s work, I’ll tell them you’ve left home.’
But no sooner had Paget picked up his knife and fork than Grace was back. ‘It’s Andrea McMillan calling from the hospital. She says they have a “situation” there, and she wants to talk to you.’
Regretfully, he put his knife and fork down and went to the phone. ‘Andrea,’ he said, ‘what’s the problem?’
Andrea McMillan wasted no time in coming to the point. ‘Sorry to trouble you, Neil, but we have a situation here, and I didn’t want to call the regular police number until I’d spoken to you. It concerns Major Farnsworth and one of our nurses. I know it’s an imposition, but I would really appreciate it if you could come and help me deal with it.’
‘If it’s that serious, of course I’ll come, Andrea,’ he said. ‘But can you give me some idea about what happened?’
‘Major Farnsworth took a fancy to one of our nurses,’ she said, ‘and she ended up on the floor with a three-inch gash in the side of her face, and she is extremely shaken up.’
‘And Farnsworth . . .?’
‘Dead,’ Andrea said coldly. ‘Now do you see why I’m asking you to come?’
‘I do indeed,’ he said. ‘Has Mrs Farnsworth been notified?’
‘Not yet, no. But I will do that as soon as—’
‘No. Don’t do that, Andrea,’ he cut in sharply. ‘I think it might be best if I have someone go to the house to break the news, and bring her to the hospital. She will want to be there, and I will need to talk to her as well.’
Gwyneth closed the gate behind her, mounted her bicycle, and set off down Manor Lane. She didn’t bother with the light. It didn’t work properly anyway, and there was hardly ever any traffic in the lane. Besides, it wasn’t as if she was unfamiliar with the route, and there was still enough light in the sky to see her home.
She rode blindly, more by instinct than conscious thought, her mind in turmoil. How she had managed to get through the day without doing or saying something really stupid she did not know. Most of it was just a blur, except for all those questions by the police. Those she remembered vividly. If she’d known she would have to answer questions like that, she’d have stayed home this morning and said she was ill.
She’d considered it as she tossed and turned and tried to sleep last night, but something had warned her not to draw attention to herself. Better to go to work as if nothing had happened; after all, what was there to fear? She was just a maid. Nobody paid any attention to maids. It had all seemed so simple then in the quiet of her room.
Her thoughts turned to the young man who had come into the kitchen late in the afternoon. Nice looking, he was, with grey eyes and a gingery moustache. She knew he must be with the police, but he looked so young and inexperienced that she was not unduly worried.
‘Sorry I missed you earlier,’ he’d apologized. ‘I thought I’d got everyone this morning, but then someone mentioned you, so I’m here to take your fingerprints. It will only take a couple of minutes. Have you ever been fingerprinted before?’
She couldn’t remember what she’d said to him. She vaguely recalled him explaining the procedure and taking her fingers one by one, rolling each one on the pad and . . .
The glare of headlights hit her squarely in the face as she rounded the bend by Lower Farm. Startled, she wobbled to a stop.
The oncoming car swung into the lane leading to Lower Farm and stopped before the gate, barring the way. A police car. The door opened on the observer’s side and a policewoman got out, while the driver remained behind the wheel.
‘That’s not very clever, Gwyneth,’ the policewoman said. ‘Riding without lights. You’d better be careful, my girl. You could run into a copper.’
Gwyneth squinted against the light reflected off the gate.
‘Val?’ she said shakily. ‘Val Short? You did give me a start.’ Confidence began to return as she recognized the girl she’d chummed around with for a while after leaving school. Val had gone on to university, and neither had ma
de the effort to keep in touch.
‘You should be more careful yourself, speeding in a narrow lane like this,’ she said. ‘You could have had me off.’
‘Come off it, Gwyn,’ Val said. ‘We weren’t speeding, as well you know, but you’re right about one thing: if we hadn’t been stopping here, we might not have seen you until it was too late, coming round the corner without a light on your bike.’
‘It was on a minute ago,’ Gwyneth said defensively. ‘I hadn’t noticed it had gone off.’
‘Well, you’d better put it back on again, then, hadn’t you?’ Val didn’t sound particularly friendly now.
‘You’re not going to give me a summons . . .?’
Val moved to the gate and opened it. ‘Not this time, Gwyneth,’ she said quietly. ‘We’ve got more serious business to attend to here.’
The car moved forward and Val swung the gate to behind it.
‘What’s that, then?’ Gwyneth called.
Val stopped, one hand still on the gate. ‘We’ve come to take Mrs Farnsworth to the hospital. Her husband just died, and we have to break the news. Nice seeing you again, Gwyn. Take care.’ She got back in the car and it moved off up the lane.
Gwyneth couldn’t breathe. Her mind was numb as she stood there astride her bike, heart pounding painfully as she tried to think. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She had to talk to someone. Not the police. Oh, no, not the police. They’d blame her . . . Oh, God! Those fingerprints! Gwyneth squeezed her eyes shut in a futile effort to banish the images inside her head. Perhaps they wouldn’t check back there, she thought hopefully, but she knew they would.
It would be no good talking to her mum, because she’d never understand. But if she didn’t talk to someone soon, Gwyneth felt that she would burst.
Driving into Broadminster, Paget’s thoughts turned to Andrea McMillan. There had been a time when he’d thought that Andrea might be the one for him, but to have carried their relationship further would have been a mistake. There had been a strong mutual attraction, but having been burned badly by one disastrous marriage, Andrea was not ready to make any long-term commitments, while Paget couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt for even thinking of another woman in those terms after losing Jill.
But time had healed. Now Andrea was married to Sten Wallen, a man she’d known since childhood, and Paget had met Grace. Deep in his heart he kept the memory of Jill alive, and he always would, but Grace had changed his life, and he still found it hard to believe that he could be so lucky twice.
Visiting hours. Paget had to circle the car park several times before he managed to squeeze in between two oversized SUVs, and once inside the hospital and he saw the number of people waiting for the lifts, he decided to take the stairs.
He was puffing hard by the time he reached the fourth floor, where Andrea met him at the desk.
‘It might be best if you had a look at Major Farnsworth’s room before we do anything else,’ she said, leading the way along the corridor. ‘And thanks very much for coming. I really do appreciate it, Neil.’
A student nurse stood beside the closed door. ‘Just a precaution in case one of the cleaners decided to go in,’ she explained, then told the girl she could go. She opened the door and Paget followed her into the room.
Andrea pulled back the curtain screening the bed. ‘I asked them to leave everything as it was so you could see it for yourself,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a mess as you can see.’
And something of an understatement, thought Paget. Bedclothes and pillows, soaking wet from the contents of an overturned water jug, were strewn about the floor. The remains of a meal – the major’s dinner, presumably – were trodden into the sodden sheets, and a metal tray and overturned chair completed the picture.
There were bloodstains on the floor and wall.
A single sheet covered the body on the bed. Andrea removed it, then stood back.
The major lay on his back. The hospital gown left his legs exposed, and Paget could see the jagged scars where surgeons had rebuilt the shattered leg. The head lolled to one side, slack-jawed in death. With cheeks collapsed and a haze of stubble white against the grey pallor of his skin, Major Farnsworth looked much older than he had when Paget had seen him last.
His attention was caught and held by four deep and ragged, blood-encrusted gouges that ran from the hairline to the chin.
Paget looked at Andrea. ‘Fingernails?’ he said. It was more a statement than a question.
She nodded, then moved forward to lift the major’s head. The hair was matted with blood not yet crusted. She let it down gently. ‘He hit it on that when he fell out of bed,’ she said, pointing to the corner of the bedside table. ‘His heart had stopped. They got him back on the bed and used the paddles on him, but there was no bringing him back after that.’ Andrea drew a deep breath and let it out again. ‘So,’ she concluded, ‘if you’ve seen enough, I’ll take you along to the staff room, and you can hear the rest of the story.’
They walked the length of the corridor to the staff room. Two people sat close together on an old vinyl-covered couch that sagged in the middle, and Paget recognized one of them from his time in hospital the previous year. Grey-haired, she was the oldest nurse on the ward. Her name was Madge, and she was talking in low tones to a much younger nurse beside her.
The girl was small and pretty, and very, very black. Paget remembered seeing her earlier in the day in the corridor outside Farnsworth’s room. She’d been smiling, he recalled, but she wasn’t smiling now. Her head was bowed, and she was shivering despite a heavy blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her hair was in disarray, and the front of her uniform looked as if it had been torn away. It covered her now only because her folded arms were holding it in place. There was a dressing on the right side of her face.
‘I believe you know Nurse Fallowfield,’ said Andrea, indicating the woman Paget knew as Madge. ‘And this is Nurse Adamu. She was in the room when Major Farnsworth died.’
The older woman looked up and smiled briefly at Paget, but the girl kept her head down.
‘Is she in shock?’ Paget asked quietly.
‘Badly shaken,’ Andrea said, ‘but not technically in shock. You can certainly talk to her.’
Madge looked up. ‘She’s scared,’ she said softly. ‘She’s afraid that she’ll be blamed for what happened. I’ve told her she has nothing to be afraid of, that it was not her fault, but . . .’ She shrugged and turned back to the girl.
‘This is Chief Inspector Paget,’ she said, ‘and I want you to tell him what happened. There’s nothing to be scared of; no one’s blaming you, but you must tell him everything. Understand?’
The young nurse lifted a tear-stained face and looked up at Paget, then at the woman beside her. ‘Will you stay?’ she whispered.
‘I’m not going anywhere until I can take you out of here with me,’ Madge assured her.
Paget pulled up a chair and sat facing the girl. ‘Just tell me what happened,’ he said gently. ‘Take your time.’
The girl nodded but she wouldn’t look at him. Then, very softly, she began to speak.
‘Major Farnsworth rang the bell, so I went to his room to see what he wanted. He said his pillows weren’t right, and he wasn’t comfortable, and asked me to help him.’ She glanced at Andrea. ‘I knew I had to watch his hands,’ she said plaintively, ‘but I didn’t expect anything like that.’
Paget threw a questioning glance at Andrea.
‘The girls have to put up with a lot of that from the male patients,’ Andrea explained. ‘The gropers and feelers are the ones who let their hands drop casually over the bedside when a nurse is leaning over, to “accidentally” stroke her thigh or perhaps her breast. Then there are the bolder ones – we get them all. The girls can usually take care of themselves, but some, like the major, are very persistent.’
‘So, how do you deal with it?’
‘As best we can. Sometimes it’s as simple as adding more adhesive than necessary to
a dressing, then yanking it off when they’re not prepared for it. And there’s always the next injection. Done properly, it can hurt like hell. They usually get the message.’
Paget turned back to the girl. ‘Please go on, Nurse Adamu,’ he said.
‘I began to straighten out his bed, but as soon as I leaned over I knew what he was up to. Like Doctor McMillan said, he had his hand down between my legs. I moved back and pretended I thought it was an accident, but . . .’ Her eyes filled with tears, and her voice rose to a squeak. ‘But he didn’t stop.’
She brushed the tears from her eyes. ‘He grabbed my uniform and pulled me down on top of him. He kept talking to me, low, like just above a whisper, saying things, saying what he wanted to do to me . . .’ She bit her lip, and for a moment anger flared in her eyes.
‘I’m sorry to have to ask you this, Nurse Adamu, but I must. Did you call out? Scream or call for help?’
‘I couldn’t. He had his arm around my neck, forcing my face into the covers. I couldn’t get my breath. He was trying to drag me into the bed, and he was very strong. I was suffocating, and all the time he was talking, groping. He kept telling me to be quiet.
‘I fought. I got one arm free and hit him on the side of the head and dug my nails in as hard as I could, but he wouldn’t let go even when I started to fall off the bed. I kept struggling, but I couldn’t get free. Then I did fall off the bed, but he still wouldn’t let go, and he fell out on top of me. He screamed and sort of reared up then fell back, and that was when Dave, the orderly, ran in and pulled him off me.’
The young nurse dropped her head in her hands. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ she sobbed. ‘Honestly, I didn’t, I didn’t.’
Behind him, Paget was aware that the door had opened and someone had entered the room. He’d assumed it was another nurse or a doctor, but it was only when Nurse Adamu raised her head to look past him, and he saw her eye grow round with fear, that he turned to look for himself.