Fifth Member

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Fifth Member Page 30

by Claire Rayner


  Mary Bodling had been sitting with her head down over something on her desk and at the sight of Twiley she went an odd purplish sort of shade. ‘What do you want, then?’ she snapped. Twiley shook his head and looked from Mike to Morley and back again.

  The policemen went through the business of identifying themselves as smoothly as usual and seemed unaware of Miss Bodling’s furious glances. ‘I need to check with you the movement of your members,’ Mike said. ‘Mr Diamond and Mr Caspar-Wynette-Gondor.’

  ‘Again?’ Mary Bodling cried. ‘We’ve wasted enough of our time on that already. If you can’t keep your records straight, young man, then don’t come here and expect me to –’

  ‘This has nothing to do with incorrect records, Miss Bodling.’ Somehow Mike rode over her so easily that she actually stopped talking and Colin Twiley glanced at him for a moment, startled. ‘It’s a matter of corroboration. The more we can fill in the wee interstices in the evidence, you understand, the better the job we can do. Now then, I’ll start with you, Miss Bodling. I’d like to know where you were at the relevant times.’ And he looked at Gil who was sitting expectantly with his notebook open and his pen poised.

  Now she seemed to go puce. ‘Where was – Are you asking me – Do you sit there and –’ She stopped, lost for words, and for the first time since Mike had dragged him so unwillingly from his own office, Colin Twiley smiled.

  Mike looked at her with his brows up, as though surprised. ‘But I have to ask, Miss Bodling. In a murder inquiry of this magnitude, you’ll understand, every tiny fact is relevant. I’m sure you’ll not mind telling me –’

  ‘I’m not a suspect, Goddamn you!’ Mary roared. ‘And don’t you dare to suggest for one moment that –’

  ‘We never make suggestions, ma’am,’ Mike said, and suddenly he sounded icy. ‘We just ask our questions and collect our evidence. So, if you don’t mind refreshing your memory – perhaps check with your diary? – I’ll get the same information from Mr Twiley here and then return to you.’

  He did and Colin told him willingly, even eagerly, as Morley scribbled fast. Since there had been business in the House on all the relevant dates Mike quoted, he had no difficulty in pointing out he’d been here all the time. ‘And,’ he added, glancing at Mary Bodling, ‘so were you, weren’t you, Mary? I remember that because –’

  ‘I am perfectly capable of speaking for myself,’ Mary boomed, banging her desk diary open. She proceeded to give precisely the same information Colin had, watching Gil beadily as he wrote it down and from time to time spelling out the simpler words very slowly to assist him.

  Mike remained sunny throughout the performance, and when she’d finished looked artlessly at her. ‘There now, that wasn’t so difficult, was it?’ he said and again her eyes glittered with rage. He just smiled and then turned back to Twiley.

  But he’d won. From then on the inquiry went as he wanted it to and Gil was kept busy with his notes. They corroborated their previous evidence on the comings and goings of their respective Members and Mike nodded happily, as though this was all he had come for. And when he’d finished, settled down to a little cosy chat.

  ‘This must be upsetting your Members,’ he said with an air of great sympathy. ‘Seeing colleagues murdered in this inexplicable fashion. It must make them look over their shoulders all the time.’

  ‘I can only speak for my own people,’ Mary said magnificently. ‘And they are much too concerned with the essential business of the Nation that they are here to carry out to bother themselves unduly with their personal welfare.’

  ‘More fool them,’ said Colin Twiley. He had been much encouraged by the way Mike had handled Mary and now sat beside him rather closer than was entirely necessary, as though he was sheltering beneath a particularly safe rock. Gil’s presence behind him seemed an added strengthener.

  Mary sniffed. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said. ‘The sort of people you have to handle are shaking in their miserable shoes, I imagine. Going in convoys of special buses to keep themselves safe, no doubt.’

  ‘They are not!’ Twiley said, stung. ‘They’re travelling like everyone else; by public transport, too, which is more than your people do. Even your Transport chap has to have a chauffeurdriven car to get around! Much he’d have to worry about the new Ripper!’

  This was getting too silly, Mike decided, exchanging glances with Morley. He felt almost as though he were back in school. ‘What I need to know,’ he said in a loud voice, ‘is whether you think there could be any political motives at work here. We outside the House know only what the papers and TV tell us, and God knows we get the impression you’re all at each other’s throats. But are you in a literal sense? Are there any issues simmering here that the public doesn’t hear about, that could be linked with these deaths?’

  Mary looked sardonic. ‘Oh, come on, Sergeant! Use your head! We have over six hundred Members in this House, the majority of them extremely ambitious, or fired with strong convictions, or both. They not only have to take great responsibilities for the Welfare of the Nation, as I said, but also have to face the matter of being re-elected every five years. Of course there are issues going on here the public doesn’t know about. And I’ll tell you this much, they aren’t going to. I can assure you that if I knew any reason why our Member should have been killed, I would tell you. I’ve already told you that I believe his – um – problems were more connected with his wife than anything here. Now, work on that and leave us alone!’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Twiley said, looking at Mary with an expression that was part loathing, part amazement, and part a sort of respect. ‘I think I have to agree with you. Uncomfortable though that has to be. David CWG’s death too is much more likely to be linked with his family than it is with anything going on here, as I believe it is with most cases of murder. I mean, if people got themselves killed here for political reasons, none of us’d be around to tell the tale. We’d be dying like flies.’

  With which, eventually, Mike had to be satisfied. As he said to Gus later, when he and Morley reported back to him: ‘I did all I could to get more out of them but they were adamant. These murders have nothing to do with political business, they’re sure of it. It’s just a coincidence, according to the fearsome Bodling, that all the dead people are involved with the Houses of Parliament. It’s strictly personal, she says. But then, she would say that, wouldn’t she?’

  Left alone in the incident room at Ratcliffe Street, George was restless. Gus had shut himself into his office to get on with a series of phone calls, for he had other problems on his plate as well as this case. After a while she sighed, stretched and told herself she ought to drop in at Old East and see what was happening there. She too had responsibilities other than this case, which she had, she reminded herself with a twinge of guilt, been neglecting. So, she put her head round Gus’s door and hissed that she was going. He just waved his hand and didn’t look up, so she slipped away. They’d meet again later in the day and exchange further notes, no doubt; right now, she could only leave him and his team to it, ache though she did to be doing more about the case.

  She chose to walk to Old East, pulling her coat collar up and thrusting her hands deep into her pockets, for it was an icy day, though bright. By the time she had made her way through the narrow side streets she used as a short cut her eyes were streaming with the bite of the sun and wind combined, and she thought, we’ve been too close to this case. The thing to do is step back a little, stop thinking about it and let the stuff that is already in our heads cool, and then wait and see what comes up with the bubbles. It was a technique she had tried before and it usually worked, she told herself optimistically as at last she reached the rear entrance to her department on the fringe of the Old East site; surely it would again.

  Jerry and Alan were genuinely glad to see her and plied her with coffee and questions about the case; she accepted the first and flatly refused the latter.

  ‘I’ve thought, breathed, slept and eaten thi
s damned case for ever,’ she said. ‘Well, it feels like for ever, though how long is it? Only a week. Anyway, I’m not going to say another word about it. I’ve had it up to my eyebrows and beyond.’

  ‘Ah, you’re rotten,’ Jerry said. ‘Here we are, gobbling all the papers, agog on the news and complimenting ourselves we had a hotline right to the horse’s mouth, and when the horse comes in it turns out to be as useless a line as – as –’

  ‘Forget the compliments,’ she said firmly. ‘Tell me what else has been going on here.’

  Alan obliged, overriding Jerry who was clearly all set to go on complaining about George’s uncommunicativeness, and she read reports, checked lists of costs, discussed the progress of various clinic commitments the department had and generally caught up.

  ‘You’ve done very well,’ she said. ‘Too bloody well, dammit. Ellen Archer’ll be telling the Trust Board they don’t need me any more.’

  ‘Oh, no she won’t,’ Alan said. ‘First of all, she’s a bloody good business manager but she doesn’t know sucks about the real work that goes on down here, and second, she’d never risk having them cut her establishment by her most senior consultant. You need have no fears.’

  George, who in fact had nourished no such doubts but had wanted to find a generous way to compliment Alan, grinned. ‘Well, bless you for that. So, how’re things otherwise? What’s happening around the place?’ She had as healthy an appetite for hospital gossip as anyone else, and had felt a touch deprived this past week, not knowing of the latest scandal.

  ‘Not a damned thing,’ Jerry said. ‘They’re still cutting the corners and counting the paperclips. If they try to squeeze any more money out of this poor bloody NHS we’ll all go down with Kwashiakor or something. Starvation is what they’re inflicting on us now, starvation.’ He shook his head. ‘The stress levels are dreadful,’ he added, looking at her piteously. ‘I feel like an overloaded camel.’

  ‘Oh, you’re breaking my heart,’ she laughed at him. ‘And as for feeling like a camel –’

  ‘No,’ shrieked Jerry. ‘Wrong example! I meant an over-worked angel. Having to worry about the sordid matter of coin all the time, it’s horrible.’

  ‘Oh, do shut up about financial matters! That’s going on all the time. Is there no new news about individuals we can chew over?’

  He shook his head with mock misery. ‘Only that Neville Carr over in Oncology’s spearheading an attempt to make the place totally non-smoking, for our health’s sake, be says. I think it’s to stop us having any pleasure at all, miserable sod. I’d been thinking about giving up, but as soon as these bloody health fascists start, I get a mad bad urge to double my intake.’

  ‘You’re giving up smoking?’ George patted his back. ‘That’s brave of you, my lad! A dollar gets you five if you keep off the weed for three months.’

  ‘Five dollars? How many cigars would that buy?’ Jerry said. ‘I don’t want to know otherwise.’

  ‘You’re on to a winner there, Dr B.,’ Alan said. ‘He’ll never stop. It’s true – there’s no real news around the place at all. That’s why we were glad to see you. We thought you’d have something enthralling to share with us.’ And he looked at her sideways before rather ostentatiously reaching for a new pile of folders to work on.

  She laughed. ‘You’re as bad as Jerry.’

  ‘No one’s as bad as me,’ Jerry said proudly, ‘and I can prove it. Dear Dr B., dear, dear delicious creature, tell us what is going on in the wilds of the Ratcliffe Street nick. You said not to ask, but I have to. I’m desperate for info! Tell us the pillow talk between you and your sexy superintendent.’

  ‘Watch it,’ she said warningly, and he had the grace to look embarrassed.

  ‘Sorree! But you see how far you push us when you won’t talk? What is happening with the case? Are you any nearer to catching the bugger?’

  She gave in. She had to. ‘Well, maybe.’ And she told them of the conversation with Sally that morning, warning them both it was highly confidential and making them swear to tell no one else. They promised, solemnly, and listened agog to the whole tale.

  ‘Italian, eh?’ Jerry burst into an imitation of an Italian tenor, singing the lines from a TV ice-cream ad. ‘Just one Cor ne-tt-o, give it to me. Just one Corne-tt-o and I’ll kill thee.’ He stopped singing and swept into a flurry of stage Italian. ‘Yes, sir, you giva me da knifa and I cutta offa your lovely bitsa dissa and datta and den I –’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Alan said. ‘You sound about as Italian as a Welsh miner with a bad hangover. Dr B., what’s the matter? Are you all right?’

  George was sitting bolt upright and staring at Jerry with her eyes wide and her lips apart. She looked as startled as though she had just been bitten somewhere unexpected.

  ‘Jerry!’ she said. ‘Jerry, do that again. Do it some more. Tell me about – about Neville Carr’s new campaign. In that Italian style.’

  Jerry looked at her and then at Alan, and shook his head. ‘She’s gone off her chump,’ he said. ‘Poor dear. It had to come, of course, but all the same, it’s painful when it does.’

  ‘Jerry, will you do as I ask you?’ She almost shrieked it. ‘Tell me what Dr Carr said about smoking. In that cod Italian accent. You must.’

  ‘Oh, Gawd,’ Jerry said. ‘Well, I’ll have a bash. Ahem …’ He was actually embarrassed, because now several other members of the lab staff had drifted over, fascinated by what they could hear of the conversation, and were staring at him. George leaned forwards and actually poked him in the ribs, commanding him to do it. So he opened his mouth and tried.

  It took him a while to get going but when he did it was amusing enough stuff, if, as Alan said loudly, ‘Bloody stereotypical!’

  ‘I ama Dr Carr, you understanda, and me, I knowa a lotta dere is to know about de lightsa and de lungsa – ze big balloonsa you gotta hera.’ And he smacked his chest. ‘Even da fellas gotta de big balloonsa here, calleda de lungas. Anda if you smoka di cigaretta, den you –’

  ‘I knew it!’ George cried and jumped to her feet. ‘I knew it. Jerry, you are wonderful.’ And she threw her arms round him and kissed him on both cheeks, hard. He stared at her as she held his face between her hands, and managed to say only, ‘Eh?’

  ‘I have to go.’ She was jubilant. ‘I can’t hang around. Listen, you’re doing a great job, a really great job. I’ll be away for the next five days – that’ll give me my two weeks – and I’m beginning to think we may be able to crack this by then. ’Bye.’ And she was gone, pulling on her coat as she ran, leaving them staring after her in blank amazement.

  ‘Gus, I have to explain to you!’ She sat at his desk, his phone in her hand, her coat still bunched around her. ‘I think I know who the Italian was – I mean I think I know what it was … No, I know I can’t tell you over the phone, but – what? … Oh, all right. What time? … Yes, I suppose it can wait, if it must but … Oh, all right, Gus!’ She cradled the phone with a small clatter and sat and stared at it, furiously.

  The frustration was huge. That she had worked out what it was that Sally had heard, she was sure, but what it meant – that was something else. There were ways of checking, of course, but if Gus wouldn’t let her tell him on the phone (and he was right; they knew only too painfully at Ratcliffe Street how vulnerable mobile phones were to interception, and Gus had been using his) she’d have to wait to explain. All the same, to make her wait till he got home tonight was almost more than she could bear, she told herself, and then grimaced at her own silliness.

  ‘I don’t have to wait for him,’ she said aloud, staring out at the incident room. There were very few people there now. If they weren’t out re-interrogating the people at the House of Commons they were searching for suppliers of overalls or busy on other routine jobs. There was certainly no one she knew well enough to accompany her; and she ached for Julie. If only she were around to help; together they’d show the rest of them how to solve this case. She was quite certain she was on the right road
, and to see it stretching in front of her and not to be able to run it – or even walk it – was dreadful.

  It was inevitable, of course. She knew she shouldn’t. She knew Gus would be furious. But she also knew she’d get answers if she did it, and that would surely mollify him, wouldn’t it? It’ll be one in the eye for Roop, if I solve this one before he and Gus do.

  It was that thought that did it. She would. She clattered away down the stairs and out of the back door of the nick into the car park as fast as she could. One or two of the other policemen and -women on the strength greeted her as she went by, but she was almost too breathless to respond to their friendly comments, and more than one noted her progress and were startled by it.

  The car needs a fill-up, she thought, but there should be enough gas in it to get me there. She pushed it out into the traffic, her London A–Z atlas open on the seat beside her, and headed steadily north and west.

  The traffic was horrendous and she crept through the City and on to King’s Cross and then up the Marylebone Road, switching lanes feverishly until at last she realized it did her no good but only made surrounding drivers boil over with rage, and settled grimly to being as patient as she could. Things weren’t much better on the Westway, but at least she could move a little, and at last, almost an hour after she had left Ratcliffe Street, she pulled off the A40 to thread her way down the Greenford Road to Harrow.

  The trouble was, she didn’t know exactly where she was going. But the place can’t be that big, she thought. I’m sure people there will know the sort of set-up I’m looking for.

  The needle on her petrol tank caught her eye and, cursing softly under her breath, she pulled into the next service station she saw, and filled up. The place was very busy for it was now almost six and the traffic was thick with eager homegoers, and she had to wait in line to pay for her purchase. But she used the time to look at the map she had thought to bring with her when she came in to pay.

 

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