‘I see. Who is the man who concerns you?’
‘He calls himself Alan Bletchley. But I don’t believe that is his real name.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did he tell you he had an intention to cause harm?’
‘No.’
‘Was he a threat to you?’
‘No.’
‘Did you have any reason to suppose he was armed?’
‘No.’
‘Are you reporting a crime?’
‘No.’
‘Have you arranged for Mr Bletchley to see a psychiatrist?’
‘Yes, but the psychiatrists aren’t interested.’
‘No. Well. That speaks volumes. Thank you for your concern doctor. We have taken note of it, and will give it due attention.’
I was being fobbed off. The chief super stepped back. I said, ‘This man has left a paper trail, or at least an electronic trail, that clearly alludes to four violent catastrophes, one of which took place not thirty miles from where we now are.’
‘Yes, Sergeant Matheson has briefed me on all that. You seem incredibly well informed in the details of these incidents. You take an interest in such material?’
‘Not particularly. The details are in the public domain.’
‘On the web. You visit these sites often? Perhaps other sites?’
I rose to my feet and gazed levelly at the chief superintendent. ‘I didn’t catch your name.’
‘I didn’t give it.’ For a moment I thought he was going to give me the speech I am so often tempted to give: You come in here, with your petty, paltry … But he decided to stay on side with the ever demanding public and he gave me his name through clenched teeth. Chief Superintendent Hoddle. It was as if he was furious to find his name on Bletchley’s grid.
IX
‘Meant to tell you last night. MacKenzie called.’
‘Oh yeah? How is she?’
‘She’s good. Wanted to know if I was looking after you. She told me to apply for disability living allowance.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Buenos Aires.’
‘What’s she doing down there?’
‘Dunno. Playing her viola I guess. Oh yes! She mentioned the name of a big opera house.’
‘The Colón.’
‘That’s it. You been to Buenos Aires?’
‘Once. Mary and I went.’
‘So you did.’
‘She loved to tango. I, on the other hand, am two left feet. I cannot boogie. I have no moves. It would be my worst nightmare to be a contestant on Strictly. Craig Revel Horwood would make mincemeat of me. Do you suppose he has a card that scores zilch? I can just hear it. “Fab-u-lous! A complete dahnce disahster dahling.”’
She giggled. ‘Darcey would be kind to you.’
‘Darcey’s kind to everybody.’
‘Let’s go to Dublin for the weekend.’
‘Can’t. I’m working.’
‘You’re always working. Your life is so dull I bet you look forward to dental appointments.’
‘As a matter of fact my dentist can be very entertaining. Dry sense of humour.’
‘Mine just tells me to floss.’
‘I prefer these interdental gizmos. Look like lavvy brushes.’
‘That’s disgusting.’
When Caitlin finally got round to leaving my flat, as she would, I would miss all this banter. Or jibber-jabber, as Mary called it. I remember in our Buenos Aires hotel room she held up the ‘Do not disturb’ sign for hanging outside the door. In Spanish, No molestar. ‘It’s official. Don’t molest me.’ And later, the half-closed lids, the whisper in my ear. ‘Put out the non-molestation order.’
Mary could be very profane, in unexpected locations. It could shock, because she didn’t look like a coarse individual. MacKenzie said she looked like Maureen O’Hara. One night in Edinburgh we attended a Sick Chicks faculty dinner – a fundraiser for cystic fibrosis research. Black tie, very posh. We were top table. The professor, Sir Michael Whittingdale – very high – led the procession, to a slow handclap, like the Lord Mayor’s banquet, with Mary on his arm. I followed, with Lady Whittingdale. As we neared the table, Mary snapped a stiletto heel. She uttered a single, flat expletive, kicked off both shoes, gathered them up very elegantly with a straight back, and carried on. Sir Michael was entirely sanguine, although Lady Whittingdale did raise her eyebrows.
Now that the police had decided I was an utter nutter I faced a bit of a quandary. Was I left without recourse? I had imagined when I took that trip across the Forth that I was crossing a bridge in every sense. The Forth had become my Rubicon. I had automatically assumed that that would be the decisive act for me. The police, the authorities, would take up the alert and explore it and lay down safeguards. For my part I would be able to close the file. My work on it would be done.
But it hadn’t worked out that way.
What now?
If I were going to take this any further I really would be crossing a line. I would be freelance. If I got into trouble there would be no help from anybody. I would be absolutely out in the cold.
The trouble with striking out on your own is that there is nobody around to tell you if you are losing the plot. You have no parameters. Where are you on the slippery slope that leads from insight through uncertainty to eccentricity and finally to madness? This is why single-handed practice is such a bad thing in medicine. But who could share this burden with me? I thought of telling Caitlin but it wouldn’t be fair. Caitlin didn’t need it. What about MacKenzie? But she was so far away. For the moment she was far away from me in every sense. I don’t mean she wasn’t sympathetic. When Mary went she sent me a card from New York that said ‘My heart is breaking for you’ and she had meant it. She came over for the funeral. She even played at it. Unaccompanied Bach. Even though I had suddenly become tone deaf I could sense she had discovered a new depth of musical expression. She had discovered a tone of voice and she found herself able to express something through it by which, along with her colleagues in the quartet, she could tap into something very deep. If it was just a noise to me at least I knew the fault was mine. I didn’t want to disturb her, to upset her concentration.
MacKenzie has pitch. I think of it as a kind of equanimity. I never had pitch. Certainly not now. Coincidentally, Caitlin has pitch. I remember how it came to light. MacKenzie had asked her if she knew Vaughan Williams’s Flos Campi, for viola, wordless choir, and small orchestra. It starts with an unaccompanied oboe solo. MacKenzie had sung it to her. Caitlin didn’t know it but when they next met, a month later, Caitlin recalled that rather dark, brooding theme, and sang it back. It was in the right key. MacKenzie had smiled broadly. ‘You’ve got pitch.’
I had another option, the one that had occurred to me on the way down to Heriot Row. Drop the whole thing. Not just Bletchley, but Blighty. Go into Little France and put a letter of resignation on Forbes’s desk. Clear the flat of my meagre belongings and load up the car. Get Caitlin back to school in Gloucestershire. Say hello, and goodbye, to Eric and Sally. Have a car boot sale and then sell the car. Buy a one way ticket to Auckland.
What was keeping me here? MacKenzie lived in the States. Certainly I was close to Mary’s people but I was probably just a liability there, a constant reminder of a terrible event. Time to move on. Get out. Go home.
But not quite yet. For a little while I would become an amateur sleuth. It amused me to think of my new-found role. A private dick. A shamus. It occurred to me to indulge in a spot of ‘profiling’. Didn’t the police employ psychologists to construct a kind of identikit of the minds of serial killers? (The police would enlist anybody if they got desperate enough – clairvoyants, mediums, psychics, water diviners, reflexologists, and other assorted crazies, you name it.) And the perpetrator of a mass shooting was a kind of serial killer; it was just that he (or she? – surely vanishingly rare) committed his serial acts within an incredibly compressed time frame. It was a
grotesque obverse of ‘the golden hour’, that window of opportunity that allowed emergency physicians to save lives rather than destroy them. What element would I select from the periodic table to characterise the rampage of a mass shooter? The plutonium hour. It would be a kind of thermonuclear event.
In the hospital residency I set up the balls on the green baize and pocketed them on automatic pilot while I constructed my Bletchley profile.
First of all, he’d be around. He wouldn’t be hidden away. The best way to become invisible is not to absent yourself, but on the contrary to merge with your surroundings. Create an atmosphere, play a part, be a part, chime in, harmonious, like a viola player. Thus, you disappear.
What can I surmise about the compiler of The Bottom Line? I assembled my identikit picture to the accompaniment of the taps and clicks and kisses of the balls. Clearly, he would be intelligent. Articulate but not verbose; precise, fastidious. A little smug, yet, deep down, dithering. Lots of bravado but no self-confidence. An eye for detail. Very angry, but in a suppressed way. Smouldering. Invisible in society. Not one to make a splash. Perhaps irritated that he is not noticed, undervalued. Lives alone. Poor Billy No Mates. Individual pursuits. A bit schizoid. Sexual orientation? Either-or but, in any case, jilted. Might harbour a grudge. Certainly not one to forget a slight. Prickly as hell.
That’s him.
I sank the black.
It’s me.
I asked Forbes over coffee, in an offhand way, ‘What’s the story with Trubshaw? Is he in trouble? Alcoholic? Is he suspended?’
‘Yes. No. And not yet. Why do you ask?’
‘Just curious.’
I’m a poor dissembler. Forbes raised his eyebrows. ‘The trouble with Trubshaw is that he is a prehistoric monster. And his trouble started a long time ago. He is a hepatobiliary surgeon who has been passed over. About fifteen years ago when they all had to learn the new laparoscopic techniques, I think he just found the learning curve too steep. He did an Anthony Eden on somebody at the Grange.’
‘Anthony Eden?’
‘He mistook the common bile duct for the cystic duct and cut it. That’s what happened to Eden. Some people think that caused the disaster of the Suez crisis and the collapse of the British Empire. It must be hard to make good decisions when you are plagued with colicky abdominal pain all the time. Trubshaw’s patient was a high flier too. A banker, I think. There was the hell of a stink. The surgeons tried to close ranks but the papers got hold of it and they had to let Trubshaw go. But the surgeons took pity on him and found him his job across the Forth. Cynical move really. It just puts the trouble on to somebody else. What does a surgeon know about emergency medicine?’
‘I see. Dear me. But that’s all history. Something else must have happened.’
Forbes sipped his coffee ruminatively. ‘That’s true.’ But he clearly wasn’t disposed to elaborate. He told me a little more about Trubshaw’s CV, but I could sense the secrecy of the confessional descending like a shutter. As far as anything scandalous was concerned, all Forbes would say was, ‘Barry Trubshaw’s coat’s on a very shoogly peg.’
It’s a rum old place if you ask me, the UK, with the unfathomable involutions and convolutions of its freemasonries. It’s not a place for the individual. People hunt in packs. Trubshaw had been isolated. He had the mark of the outcast upon him. He was a leper. A pariah. He had been blackballed. He was no longer a member of an exclusive club. He might even have been handed a pistol with a single round in the magazine. Rum place.
Why is it so weird? It’s the legacy of the empire. The people who are running the show now were brought up at a time when the map on the wall in the primary school classroom was still predominantly pink. The Mercator projection served to accentuate the pinkness. Pole to pole, great swathes of shocking pink. With all this power and influence, surely it must be the greatest stroke of good fortune on earth to be born an Englishman. (A Scot can be an honorary Englishman as long as he observes the club rules. Formidable chaps, these Jocks. Fight like dervishes, y’know. Very excitable, highly stressed individuals. Berserkers.)
From my own point of view, I found the low-down on Trubshaw encouraging as far as it went. I knew I would have to go back to PMH if I wanted to find Bletchley and I just couldn’t see my way in. People might have a vague recollection of me, and of the shift I put in, but I would have no right to inspect the records and any attempt to follow up a patient at this distance would be bizarre. I would be an outsider and my temporary password to the computer screens would have expired.
But I had this notion that Trubshaw might be a way in. A man who is down, and being kicked, looks for allies. So on my next afternoon off I went to see him. I telephoned his secretary and booked an appointment. I deliberately rehearsed my first journey, missing my stop and retracing my steps through the campus of Clerk Maxwell.
How very odd to be back. Everything was just as it had been. I walked past the same security barrier and over the same trim pathways through the landscaped lawns with their scattering of leafless trees silhouetted against a dull grey sky. The same sense of precognition. I might even have passed the same students. Why is it that a young woman going for a walk can’t seem to detach herself from her smart phone? It’s like a baby’s dummy or an old man’s pipe, a comforter. Maybe it’s a way of sending out a message to passing males: don’t bother me.
The haar hadn’t shifted.
Odd, too, to be back inside PMH ED, a department I had not thought to revisit. There wasn’t much going on. The waiting area was almost empty. There was a cleaning lady moving among the chairs with a broom. The place was like a deserted film set in the back lot of an abandoned studio. I announced myself at reception and the clerk swipe-carded me through into the administrative warren and the suite of offices along the back corridor. We reached a stout oak door bearing a name plate which had lost a screw and a couple of letters and was hanging at a perilous angle. The legend read ‘Mr B. Tr bshaw, Dire tor’. It was as if he was vanishing in front of everybody’s eyes. Maybe there was no point in carrying out a simple repair. The clerk knocked and went ahead of me, announcing me in a low voice, and ushering me through. She left us and closed the door softly behind her.
‘Ah! Cameron-Strange!’ A squat jowlish man rose from behind a desk and raised a hand in cheery salute. I was momentarily distracted by the desk top. It was the most untidy I had ever set eyes on. It was overflowing with bizarre knick-knackery. There were ancient medical museum pieces – a first edition Bailey and Love, a microscope Pasteur might have used, a plethysmograph with a rotating drum covered in soot, and ancient surgical instruments doubling as paperclips, paperknives, and other elements of office detritus. The Sellotape dispenser held a roll of zinc oxide surgical tape. Behind it sat a pathological specimen preserved in a bottle which I didn’t care to examine. I could imagine an irate Matron periodically shooing Trubshaw out of his domain and conducting a radical deep clean. But it would be futile. It would all reaccumulate. I forced my gaze away from the morass and fixed on the heavy man in the buttoned-up white coat. I had the odd notion that moments ago he had donned the heavy accoutrement of his sluggish professional personality. It had been an enormous effort but he was seasoned to it. We shook hands. The grey face quivered. I found myself saying, incongruously, ‘Are you okay?’
‘Fine! Fine!’ The words exploded like shots from a starter pistol, one for the off, one for a false start. He grabbed the initiative back. ‘Sit down, please. The nurses told me all about you. You made a great impression I must say. I suppose it is a young man’s game, being a Cas Officer. Sorry! Emergency Physician. I must get the style or title right. We’d be pleased to have you back. Just take it easy with all these central lines and rapid sequence inductions. Don’t be a cowboy. Don’t be gung-ho.’ He reminded me of a deposed prime minister, who seeks obscure platforms from which to make pronouncements, under the delusion that he can still influence world affairs. ‘Now let’s check the roster.’ He took a tiny diary o
ut and frowned at it, chewing his lip. ‘Cover for January. You don’t mind nights?’ The monologue was running away.
‘Mr Trubshaw, I’m not looking for work. I’m actually here about a patient.’
‘Oh!’
‘His name’s Alan Bletchley. At least, that’s the name he used …’ I recounted the story for the umpteenth time. It was all news to him. Any material I had copied to him, if it had crossed his desk, certainly hadn’t crossed his mind. I had lost my reticence. I was getting quite blasé about the daftness of it all. I’d an instinct that Trubshaw would try to help without looking for a hidden agenda; it would just be such a relief to him to be of use, to be needed. My instinct proved right. I let him think out loud, blundering his way through all the blind alleys I’d previously explored. Now that I was seated I could see the framed family photograph which for him at least obscured the view of the pathological specimen. There was a pretty woman with a smile which seemed to withhold some painful knowledge; and two teenage children, boy and girl, in smart school uniform, grinning oafishly at the camera. Next to the picture there was another framed artefact; it was a piece of verse printed in rather elaborate uncial script. I recognised Kipling’s If.
If you can keep your head, when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …
If … if … if … All these preconditions. Did Trubshaw use them as a primer to teach his son how to be a man? More likely they were his own vade mecum, providing him with a compass through the rough seas of life. Trubshaw struck me as an iffy man. A man who lived his life in the subjunctive mood. An if only man. Somehow, somewhere, sometime, he had taken a wrong turning in his life, and he had never been able to find his way back.
Yet here he was, musing on my behalf. ‘Pity the computers crashed that night. But there might be a trace of a record somewhere. Maybe he’s a frequent attender. A revolving door patient. Maybe he’s on CCTV. How long do we keep the film for? I haven’t the foggiest. Shall we check? Let’s go through.’
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