First Blood

by Claire Rayner

  Jerry looked up and grinned at her. ‘How does it feel to have hit the jackpot?’

  ‘I wasn’t gambling,’ she said repressively. ‘Just doing my job,’ and again Gus snickered.

  ‘And trying to interfere with mine while she’s at it,’ he said in an amiable tone and Jerry laughed. ‘But I dare say you’re used to that, eh?’

  ‘I’ll take my bleep with me,’ George said, looking as though she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. ‘There shouldn’t be anything special, but if there is …’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ Jerry promised and she nodded crisply and marched out, a manoeuvre which was rather hampered by the fact that Gus was leaning against the door and made no effort to get out of her way. But she managed it and fetched her topcoat from her office, transferring the precious photographs from the pocket of her white coat, which she shed, to its capacious inside pocket. She was damned if she’d let Gus get them in his supercilious hands, she told herself. They were hers and there was no way he was going to claim the credit for having them now.

  Outside it was still cold and blustery, which made the chill bite harder. Her eyes watered a little behind her glasses and she sniffed hard.

  ‘I’ll soon have you all cosied up,’ he said as he strode along beside her so fast she was hard put to it not to break into a little run to keep up. ‘You’ll feel better then. Got to look after you, haven’t we? Seein’ you’re not used to going out and about on investigations that much – and why should you be, after all?’

  She ignored that too, and went on, her head down, until at last he stopped on the far side of the car park.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, and she could almost feel the pride oozing out of him as he unlocked the car door.

  What a stunning car, was her first reaction. Her father had always had a sneaking affection for old autos and she’d learned a good deal from his attachment. It was obvious that this was a very special one. Black, shining, with the unmistakable lines and trims of a nineteen-seventies model, it was clearly a much-loved object, and she couldn’t help her admiration showing.

  ‘Not bad, is she?’ Gus said modestly, actually patting the roof. ‘She was me old dad’s. He never drove her much, mind you, but he reckoned a man as successful as he was deserved a good motor, so a good motor he got. And then left it in the garage most of the time. He liked using shanks’s pony or gettin’ on a bus. Said it gave him a better view of his customers. As though everyone wasn’t his customer anyway, seeing he sold the best fish in all London.’

  ‘It’s very nice,’ she said, and then couldn’t maintain the air of coolness any longer. ‘Very nice. It’s a –’

  ‘Thirteen hundred Austin Van den Plas. Original leather upholstery, still got the picnic hamper in the back, all that, but I’ve done a few things to the engine. She can really move now. Got twin Weber carbs, raised compression ratio, and I stiffened the suspension and put on low profile tyres. She rides like a dream. Get in, then.’

  She did and took a deep breath of the satisfying smell of leather as she settled back into the comfort, enjoying the look of the polished wooden fascia in front of her. When he got in beside her she said impulsively, ‘She’s beautiful!’

  ‘I knew we’d get on well,’ he said. ‘Any woman who understands what a good car should be like has to be a woman worth knowing. Don’t forget your seat belt. It was sacrilege to fit ’em, but it was the law.’

  The car moved smoothly, manoeuvring easily out of the hospital yard and into the mainstream of the traffic, always heavy at this time of day, and took off along the Highway. She sat and stared ahead of her, revelling in it. He looked at her sideways after a while and said casually, ‘I suppose you’ll have to get back to the hospital this afternoon?’

  ‘Mmm? I told you, I’ve only got an hour. Of course I have to go back.’

  ‘I just thought we could go and have a drink or something afterwards.’ He pulled the wheel round to take them down towards the river and the Docklands Development area. ‘Get to know each other better, like.’

  She turned her head to look at him. ‘That’s a change of tune.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Back at the hospital you were complaining because I wanted to come on this trip, and now –’

  ‘One thing’s got nothing to do with the other. I told you, I like you. You’re all right. Especially now I know you’re keen on old cars. We could talk about engines.’

  ‘I don’t know that much about engines. And anyway, don’t change the subject.’

  ‘Who’s changing any subjects? I just said, let’s go and have a drink and talk about cars.’

  ‘As long as I don’t talk about the case, is that it?’ she said. ‘You want to turn me into a – a date so that you stop having to deal with me as an equal colleague in work? It’s an old trick, that, and –’

  He sighed. ‘There you go again. If you grow any more feminist prickles you’ll end up like a porcupine. Whatever you do, you’ll have to do it so carefully it’ll be no fun any more.’ He slid his eyes sideways for a moment before returning his attention to the road. ‘That’d be a pity.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said disgustedly. ‘That stupid joke is as old as last week’s cold cabbage and just as boring.’

  ‘Whoops!’ I’d better be extra careful, hadn’t I? You’ll be having me for sexual harassment next.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be such a wimp. If I couldn’t handle someone like you, I wouldn’t regard myself as safe going out without my mom. Do me a favour, Hathaway. Just be businesslike, will you? We can dispense with the footsie game.’

  ‘What a woman!’ he said with an air of great admiration. ‘What a woman! All right, here we are. Equal colleague, are you? Then get yourself out of the car and up the stairs. I’ll see you there.’ And she had barely got out of the car and pulled her coat belt tight than he’d locked it and gone zooming up the road and into Oxford’s building, nodding at the policeman standing there, leaving her to follow him. She was irritated to realize how much she minded being left behind.

  ‘It’s a bit much, ’n’t it?’ he said when they were standing in the middle of the living room. ‘Looks like a tart’s dream of heaven.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ she said. ‘Any more than you would. I know it looks expensive.’

  ‘Cheap, though. All this stuff … Cost a fortune, no doubt, but at the end of the day, look at it.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said, agreeing with him and not wanting to say so. The room that had taken her breath away the first time she had seen it looked tawdry now. The gold leaf of the pillars seemed as insignificant as toffee paper, and the thick leatheriness of the furniture and the curtains could have been the cheapest plastic in the bleak daylight. It was like a Christmas tree the day after New Year’s when the lights are dead and the tinsel is threatening to tarnish at any moment.

  ‘Looks the same in here, doesn’t it?’ he said, glancing at the photographs she had taken from her pocket. ‘Not that you took many in here.’ He took them from her and she relinquished them without demur.

  ‘I concentrated on the bedroom and bathroom. Your sergeant was in here so I didn’t hang around.’

  ‘I’ll ask him what he remembers. Bedroom next then, if, that is, you don’t mind.’

  ‘It’s what I came to do,’ she snapped and moved away, following her memory to the bedroom door.

  Here too the intrusion of daylight made it seem diminished. The carpets looked tired and crumpled, the mirrors simply silly. The sheets had been taken away and the counterpane and blankets left folded under the pillows from which the slips had been removed. They looked almost pathetic beneath the tulle drapes hanging dispiritedly from the ceiling fitting. George looked around, making herself remember it as it had been, pulling the picture back into her mind almost as a conscious effort. It was a trick she’d long ago taught herself; she had always had a good memory, though it had never been fully eidetic – the sort of immediate imprinting that enables owners of such memories
to read with their mind’s eye a page only once seen – but she could bring herself very close to it. She did so now.

  ‘Apart from the changes in the bed,’ she said, ‘the rug’s been moved. It was right beside the bed, that extra thick one, and now it’s been put down beside the dais. And the chair that was by the fireplace has been shifted back a foot or two.’

  He looked at her in silence and then down at the pictures in his hand, shuffling them till he found the relevant ones of the bedroom.

  ‘That was some display,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘I told you I was useful.’

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe. But that useful? Lady, you’re incredible! Is that all in here?’

  ‘I think …’ She looked around again and narrowed her eyes, bringing back the memory so that she could superimpose it on what she was actually seeing. ‘Yes. It is.’

  ‘Bathroom, then.’

  He led the way, much more polite now, holding the door open for her. She was childishly pleased to have had so marked an effect on him. That’ll show him, she thought. That’ll show him.

  Here in the bathroom, where there was no outside window to admit the dull daylight, the artificial light was glittering its magic, and the effect of tawdriness was absent. The room looked as exotic as it had the first time she’d seen it. She stared round and then shivered a little.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Decadent, ’n’t it? That’s the only word I can think of that fits.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said absently and forced her memory to work once more, doing the same superimposition trick she’d done in the bedroom. ‘It all looks much the same so far. That toothglass was on the side like that, and the toothbrush on the ledge. And the smear on the mirror, I remember that too.’

  He was scribbling in a notebook. ‘Anything else?’

  She hesitated. ‘Not with the doors closed. I looked inside though, too. And snapped that as well. Look and see.’

  He riffled through the photographs again, selected half a dozen and set them out in a row on the tiled edge of the washbasin.

  ‘They’re good pictures. Taken from the right angles. Well done.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, not really listening, and pored over them. ‘Yes, they’re the ones. I don’t want to look though, not too much. Let me remember …’

  ‘With pleasure,’ he said with some fervour and stepped back as she moved to open the cupboard doors.

  One after another she stared at them: the rows of bottles and lotions, the tubes of creams, the pill bottles, all the usual bathroom equipment with the added items she’d expect to see in the possession of a man who was moderately hypochondriac. And in her experience, that was most men beyond the age of fifty or so.

  ‘It looks undisturbed to me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think anyone’s moved a thing.’ She frowned, concentrating, and shook her head. ‘Do the pictures match?’

  He moved forward and went from open cupboard to open cupboard, and as he moved his reflection was picked up by the mirrors and thrown from one to the other so that first he seemed to disappear into an eternal vista of repetitions of himself and then seemed to grow and loom closer like an army of one man marching. It created an odd sensation and she had to close her eyes for a moment because it made her giddy.

  ‘They agree with you. Nothing moved. Not a thing. Hmm.’ There was silence as he stood and looked down at the pictures.

  ‘Now what?’ she said at last.

  He looked up. ‘I’m not sure. I think perhaps … Yes, I’ll get our fingerprints chap over. Not that I expect to get anything …’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of thin black silk gloves, the sort that George wore when she went skiing, and pulled them on. ‘Watch me and make sure I’m careful. I want to look at some of this stuff.’

  Gingerly and with great delicacy he lifted some of the medicine bottles from the cupboards, picking them up by the milled edges of the caps. ‘Surfaces like this don’t take prints so I can’t do any harm here,’ he murmured and turned the bottles round to read the labels, one after the other. ‘Paracetamol: good old painkiller. Aspirin: ditto. He must have had a lot of headaches. Multivite – well, yes, we’ve all got those lying around. Sustenol – what’s that?’

  ‘Male hormone,’ she said and he chucked his chin in a gesture of unsurprise.

  ‘Yeah, well he was the sort as’d use that kind of thing. Looked like it, anyway. No pharmacist’s label on it, just a doctor’s name. I’ll check on that. I imagine this is one of the Harley Street blokes Oxford used and who his GP was so sharp about.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ she said. ‘I hear there’s quite a – a good deal of that sort of work done in Harley Street.’

  ‘Quite a trade you were going to say, and perfectly correctly, too. Some of these so-called specialists are little more than meat marketeers. Makes me sick. If you’d ha’ known what they got up to before the abortion act, and how much money they made – Well, take it from me, they was bad news. What’s this? Amytal …’ He unscrewed the bottle carefully and peered in. ‘Capsules.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘It goes with the male hormone, perhaps. It’s an – um –’

  ‘I rather think I know about this. Use it when you’re having sex and it blows your head off, right? Only you’ve got to time it right.’

  She was pleased with herself for not blushing. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘There’s not much they didn’t get up to, is there? What about these things?’ He was picking up tubes now. ‘Lubricating jelly – well, we won’t go into that, I think. I know enough about that. Zinc and castor oil cream with cod liver oil?’

  ‘Useful for pruritus. Itching. Acts as a barrier cream, too.’

  ‘Mmm. And this?’ He was peering at another label. ‘ “The Cream. Use as required.” Very informative, that is.’

  ‘Show,’ she said. He held it out to her and she read the list of ingredients on the label. ‘I thought so. That’s a haemorrhoid cream.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t it say so?’

  ‘Because he had it privately dispensed.’ She shook her head disgustedly. ‘He could have bought a formula much like this over the counter anywhere for a quid or two. God knows what he paid for this, just because it was specially made up –’

  ‘Haemorrhoids,’ Gus said. He shook his head as he put the tube back into its place. ‘Supposed to be funny in some circles. I’m here to tell you they ain’t.’

  ‘I’m not interested in your medical history.’

  ‘I wasn’t telling you mine,’ he said mildly. ‘It was me old dad. A martyr to ’em, he was.’

  This time she did redden. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Did Oxford have bad ones? Could account for his reputation as a bad-tempered type sometimes.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Eh?’ He looked at her sharply. ‘Didn’t you look?’

  ‘Not specifically. One doesn’t usually.’

  ‘Oh, well, you can always check up.’

  ‘I suppose so. Is it all that necessary?’

  ‘We have to check everything in a murder investigation,’ he said, and now he was very serious. ‘You know that. I have to get these pills and creams and so forth checked at forensic, have to interview all the prescribing doctors. It’ll take ages.’ He sighed. ‘Could you take on some of ’em?’

  ‘Me? Take on what?’

  ‘You’re quicker than the police labs,’ he said. ‘If I can get some of the work done by you as well as sending some of it off to our own forensic people it’ll save me a lot of time. I could do with it. Seeing I was stupid enough not to listen to you and wasted all the time I could have been on the job.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a bit of a cheek asking you a favour when you’ve already got me out of shtook just by insisting on doing your job properly and finding out it was a nasty one. But I’d appreciate it’

  She was silent for a moment and then said a little hesitantly, ‘I think you mean that.’

  ‘Of course I do. You’ll
have to get used to me, you know. I’m always serious. Except when I’m joshing, and you can usually tell when I’m doing that. If you’re clever. And you’re clever.’

  ‘Thanks a lot. Well, I suppose I could. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Let me get the boys here, get the place resealed, and the man on duty relieved – he’s been here all day. I’ve set up my incident room at the nick and you can send down there tomorrow to pick up –’ He saw her raised eyebrows and lifted his hands in mock self-defence. ‘Sorry, sorry! I’ll send over the stuff I’d like you to work on, after the fingerprinters have done their bit, and leave you to check up on it. OK? Do we have a deal?’

  ‘Well, I suppose so …’

  ‘Lady, you’re a gent,’ he said, taking her hand and shaking it warmly. ‘I’ll go and make the necessary calls and then I’ll take you back to Old East. Ta, George.’ He flicked his thumb and forefinger in that imaginary salute at that invisible hat brim and left her standing in the bathroom surrounded by a disappearing vista of herself in all the mirrors, and feeling once again rather self-satisfied.

  15

  George was in the small lab, sorting through the contents of Oxford’s bathroom cabinets which Gus had sent over to her, watched by Jerry who was scrutinizing her in his most birdlike manner.

  ‘What are we looking for then?’ he asked. ‘Is it something special? Or –’

  ‘Everything there is to be found,’ George said. ‘He died of digitalis overdosage, but there was none in his possession as far as we could see and we have no record of his ever being treated with it. Or so the GP says. The police are dealing with the various Harley Street types he used’ – she flicked one of the tubes of cream a little dismissively – ‘but until we hear from them, we have to check everything. He must have got it somehow. So we need to see if anything from his bathroom was adulterated in any way.’

  Jerry picked up a bottle of vitamins. ‘You mean one of these might have had digitalis in it?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘But they couldn’t.’