No one but Helen would haul into his office some ragtail of a wizened medical man with some time-wasting story. In semi-rural Essex, Redwood had been in the zealous habit of ordering the prosecution of everything which moved, but now the sheer volume of work in the inner city had wrought huge changes in his practice. If there was any excuse to turn away a case, he took it, in a desperate attempt to control the huge numbers of files which rolled through the office day in, day out, like volcanic lava, hot, inexorable and suffocating. Without the sort of evidence which would survive a legal firing squad he dumped that case in the waste bin. Reports not submitted in double-spaced typing were rejected and any case requiring the valuable and unavailable resource of man hours was likely to go the same way. So, despite the story-telling he was hearing, he regarded today’s exercise as no more than an hour’s entertainment. Something to tell his wife when he got home. He was beginning to consult his watch, listening to the medic, noting the pleasant Irish of his voice, distrusting him more than somewhat. Medical men, anaesthetists, surgeons, whatever, should not look like that.
Dr Hazel was in fine form. Work, a project of any kind, had lent wings to his mind and freed his tongue for an audience.
‘Twelve milligrammes,’ he was saying jovially. ‘Not necessarily lethal, your pathologist said, and he was right. Just about the equivalent of light anaesthesia in a patient, but quite enough to polish off someone vulnerable. The difference is that the far higher doses on record, twice as much or near enough, were administered with oxygen. You can take far more that way. Chloroform used to be the darling of anaesthetists, but there were a few hazards. For one, the poor devil of a patient would fight it, never liked the smell, sick and heavy, like the fumes themselves. A very heavy vapour. Fight too hard with a weak heart, off you went. The other curse was taking too much, slowed down your respiration so much you were likely to give up the breathing business altogether. Then, once they got the dosages right, they discovered a dreadful effect on the liver, especially children’s livers. Degenerated afterwards, so they died when they should have been cured. The whole thing improved when the heavy-handed gave oxygen with the vapour. The problem, you see, with any anaesthetic you inhale, is getting enough to put you under while getting sufficient oxygen to keep you alive at the same time. They managed that with a metal mask. Used masks, for chloroform and ether …’
‘The surgeons used metal masks?’ Redwood asked, clearly horrified at the vision of an operating theatre full of highwaymen.
‘No, no,’ said Dr Hazel kindly, ‘but do you ever remember a mask on your face when you went to the dentist? No, perhaps not, you’re not old enough.’ For this flattery, Redwood was grateful. ‘No,’ Hazel went on, ‘they would put a mask, more like a frame over the patient’s face. A sort of wire structure, with a tube inside to give oxygen in the more sophisticated versions, but anyway, really no more than a metal circle with struts, on which you put gauze. On the gauze, you dripped the chloroform, or ether – both evaporate quickly – and the patient simply breathes in the fumes without the liquid touching the skin. It burns, you see, chloroform, leaves a white mark. All in all, ether was better. Pleasanter for the patient, so fewer heart attacks, didn’t slow down the respiration either.’
‘Why didn’t they use that all the time then?’ Redwood was beginning to be irritated. Time was short, his stomach was rumbling and medical details made him queasy.
‘Fashion, for one. Combustion, for another. Ether is highly combustible. You could never have used it in the same room as a bunsen burner and a lot of primitive operating theatres would have had those. As well as a surgeon who smoked a cheroot during surgery.’
‘How disgusting,’ commented Redwood, a fervent anti-smoker at all times. Helen, who was longing for a cigarette, remained poker-faced, and Hazel, in similar state, merely continued. ‘Besides, ether had a frivolous reputation. Ether frolics, not unknown, sniffing the stuff to make you high, a social pastime by the same sorts of people who might now snort cocaine. Chloroform too, clumsier, though. Made a fellow sexy. They once used chloroform as a truth drug too, you know. Gave it to a suspect in police custody, to make him talk. Couldn’t see you people getting away with that now.’ He chuckled, to Redwood’s mind, obscenely. Redwood shuffled in his seat. His irritation was becoming obvious. ‘We’re not the police, you know,’ he began, but the only effect was to make Hazel talk more.
‘The stuff has a use in crime, too, of course. A woman was supposed to have murdered her doctor husband with chloroform and a few teams were up before the beak for using it in robbery. Not likely, I’d have thought. Takes too long to work, and the amount you could clap over someone’s mouth would only work for a minute or two. Which is the point here, don’t you see? Miss West and I agree on that.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Redwood, lost. What an unholy alliance, Helen West and some scruffy eccentric, making something out of nothing while he needed her to go to court or sit inside with a mammoth fraud case which had been lingering here in the corner far too long. Get on with it. If stupid chemist’s wives wanted to ape dilettante Victorians, and sniff disused anaesthetics, killing themselves in the process, it might all be very interesting, but not the business of the Crown Prosecution Service. Of which, he was, he reminded himself, the local leader, with no time to spare. He was only interested in proof, and not as in whisky or drugs either.
‘You see –’ Hazel was leaning forward confidentially on the side of Redwood’s desk ‘– you can only inhale chloroform, you can’t drink it, or at least, never of your own free will, and anyway, there was none in her stomach. As far as I can see, you cannot, by yourself, get enough in your blood to anaesthetise you, let alone kill you, do you see? Somebody has to help you, do you see? To get that inside you, you need an anaesthetist. That’s why we buggers were invented, you see? For the simple reason that you have to go on inhaling after you’ve gone to sleep. The point of this case is not whether twelve milligrammes is lethal or not. The point is you can’t self-administer when you’re unconscious.’
‘Oh,’ said Redwood, light dawning. ‘Yes, I do see.’
‘All right, Duncan?’
Bailey’s question did not demand any real reply. Any kind of grunt would do to answer this expression of concern. Bailey had thought Duncan looked better over the last few days. Perhaps he and the wife had patched things up, or perhaps DC Perry had seen the futility of haunting the back of Herringbone Parade in the hope of finding her in need, finding her out, or simply seeing her, this wife of his. He knew this would be no use to the wife, but he was no stranger to the self-defeating nature of Duncan’s kind of love. Nor was he unfamiliar with Duncan’s kind of need. Less directly, and many years before Helen, he had discreetly haunted his own ex-wife, who had rejected him with more mad violence than Kimberley Perry could ever have summoned. Kimberley was at least sane, and unlike Bailey’s one-time spouse, had a living child, not a dead one. Bailey understood far more about obsession than his bland expression could ever indicate and somehow Duncan recognised he would not be speaking into a void.
‘No, sir, I’m not all right. Not really.’
Bailey got up and shut the door between his office and the next. The voices on telephones, the clack of a typewriter, another detective telling a joke, faded significantly. As soon as the door closed, the joke ended and there was a burst of raucous laughter. Duncan flinched.
‘I crunched the car,’ he said. ‘Outside Kim’s flat.’
‘Were you drunk?’ Bailey asked in neutral tones. Duncan snorted.
‘No, but I was later on. I got a taxi home, don’t worry. Sodding car was towed off. She came out and screamed at me, see? Because I was late picking up the kid and he came home from school by himself. After that, I’d picked him up from home, took him for a hamburger, and when she came in, been shopping or something, she didn’t know where he was, only that he’d been round the corner into the chemist earlier and then disappeared. So she screamed, really tore me off a strip. Said I shou
ld sod off altogether, not come round the place any more, stop stealing her things and hanging about. Stealing her things? She got hysterical, I tell you. So I said, what the fuck did she think she was doing anyway, out at work all the time, and letting the boy play round with a junkie? He does, you know, he told me.’ The memory of all this screaming was making Duncan agitated.
‘Hold on, how old is the boy?’ Bailey was always uncomfortable when the professional lives of Helen and himself were enmeshed, but for the moment, he was grateful that her conversation about Carlton’s Chemist made him vaguely familiar with the lives of all who sailed with her. Otherwise Duncan would have been difficult to follow. People in distress, he had noticed, assumed you knew far more about them than you actually did.
‘He’s just ten,’ Duncan said, as if Bailey should have known. ‘And most mornings, this bloody junkie takes him to school. Oh, he’s a tame junkie, not black either, stable, comes into the pharmacist every day for his prescription. But I ask you, still a junkie. Who does she think she is, to tell me off? Even I could do better than that …’
‘But you were late for the boy, and you did take him off without telling her where you were going, or leaving a message. She must have been worried sick, you idiot. No wonder she shouted.’ His voice disguised any hint of lecture or disapproval. Duncan looked at his hands.
‘All right. But I got so mad when that poncey little chemist, her bloody boss, comes out from somewhere and tells me to piss off. He tells me, stuck up little fart, seems to think he’s God’s gift. I know Kim’s always said there’s nothing going on there, and I know his wife’s just died, but I don’t believe her nothing going on, what with him shaking his fist, putting his arm round her and taking her back indoors, my wife. My bloody wife!’ The recitation ended in a shout. There was a sudden silence from next door.
‘That’s right,’ said Bailey evenly. ‘Let them all know, go on.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Come on, we’ll go out for the rest of this. Leave your coat.’
Rather than running the gauntlet through the CID office where the laughter was now quiet, they both went out through the front office, raising the heavy flap on the counter to go through, Bailey nodding en route towards the custody officer behind the desk. In the small lobby which fronted the grey outside world, three people were waiting, one black, one white, one female, all dejected. Missing cars, missing friends, perhaps; they had not arrived to celebrate good news. ‘Got a quorum there,’ Duncan remarked. ‘You know, one black, one white, one woman.’ Bailey smiled at the signs of normality. The custody officer watched them go, as he listened to a man explaining why he was without a driving licence. Easy life for some, coming and going as they pleased. Form-filling with one laborious hand, he picked up the phone with the other, listened, breathing heavily. ‘No, not here, mate. We can’t send anyone from here, we don’t cover Herringbone Parade. Yes, I know it’s only down the road but we don’t cover it here. I don’t care if you’ve got Sophia Loren. Phone up Bethnal Green, good lad, OK?’ Looking at the departing back of DC Perry, he scowled. Pull the other one sunshine, looking so miserable. He’d heard it all. One of these days, Bethnal Green would do them a favour. Catch Perry mooning around drunk, and good riddance.
‘What exactly was it you wanted to achieve, Helen? I mean, Miss West?’
Oh, ho ho, no signs of a democratic set-up here. We are all Mr, Mrs, Miss. She never let show her constant amusement at Redwood’s frightful pomposity.
‘Well, at this stage, not a lot, beyond the fact that this death is most unlikely to be accidental. Which means it could be criminal. The purpose of introducing you to Dr Hazel was to show I’m not alone in my view. If this should ever come to trial, he could act as an expert witness, but, for the moment, I only want your blessing to pay him to do further tests.’
‘For what?’
‘To show how long it takes to inhale twelve milligrammes of chloroform vapour. To see if a person could do that by themselves. If so, no case.’
‘Doesn’t look like much of a case whichever way you turn it,’ he grumbled.
‘Granted. But we have to know, don’t we? And Dr Hazel won’t charge much. He came here this morning for free.’ Helen cast a glance at the budget sheets hidden beneath other papers on Redwood’s desk, sorry for him, relieved, not for the first time, that she had avoided promotion.
‘Right,’ he said, looking at her with resigned exasperation. ‘Keep it cheap. Oh, and …’ Helen was halfway to the door. ‘Check the chap’s credentials, will you?’
She nodded, avoiding his eyes, unwilling to confess a suspicion that these credentials might not be entirely immaculate. She had nothing to base this suspicion on other than the knowledge that she liked Hazel and knew full well how rarely she liked anyone with a blameless past. To Redwood, for one gratifying moment, she was merely five foot four slender inches of deferential servant. Until she smiled.
‘Don’t waste time on it, Helen,’ he snapped. ‘Plenty of real cases here.’
A dance, Helen thought. The law is a long, slow, dance. You learn the minuet in stages and you never hurry. No room for a sense of emergency anywhere: never frighten the decision-makers.
The whole day had gone on too long.
‘You made him do it, Mummy. You did, you did. So why should he say he’s sorry? You made Dad go right back into that wall, you did, by shouting at him.’
‘Tom, I told you to stay indoors. And Dad lost his temper. He wasn’t just reversing his car, he was trying to reverse it into Uncle Pip’s car, which was naughty, to say the least. He deserved to go into the wall.’
‘He didn’t mean it. Why would he do that?’
Tom could guess why Dad should, and sympathised. On the way home from school with Mum, he was arguing for the sake of arguing, still angry from the night before, without tears, simply cold recrimination. She put a hand on his shoulder as they walked down the Parade, but he shrugged it away, deliberately hurtful. She pretended not to notice. At least there was conversation, unlike this morning when silence had governed breakfast. Kim felt very old.
‘Daddy was cross with Uncle Pip for interfering,’ she said mildly. ‘And I was very, very cross with him for not meeting you from school, then taking you off like that. Can’t I go out, once in a while … Oh, never mind. Anyway, I’m sorry: I shouldn’t have screamed. Neither should he, so we’ll both say sorry. All right?’
‘All right.’ He kicked a paving stone, felt his satchel thump on his back, the metal helmet inside digging into his spine. He wanted to show her the wire helmet, unsure whether she deserved such privilege. The sulk was receding, started only because he was sick of being asked to see Mum’s point of view and he knew he deserved a better reward. For being good, fielding off all Dad’s questions, saying Mum was fine and no, she didn’t go out with the chemist, or anyone else, and then all Mum did was scream at Dad. And have Uncle Pip put his arm round her, so now Dad would think he, Tom, was a liar. You never resolved anything with grown-ups. They never listened.
Mrs Beale stood at the door of her shop as they passed and Tom cringed, too late. ‘Evening, Kim. Oh, there’s Tom. How’s my little man, then? Don’t like parties too much, do we?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’ Kim stopped to answer for him, laughed. Asked, ‘How’s things going then? How’s your mother?’ Got Tom off the hook of questions. She was careful to be nice to the neighbours, natural in any event since she was full of defensive kindness, but Tom never guessed how much she passed the time of day for his sake. To cure their isolation, make them accepted. A vain hope while Mrs Beale gazed at Kim’s voluptuous figure with envy. Thinking almost aloud how a girl like that, as edible as ice-cream, couldn’t possibly be up to any good.
‘Heard anything more about Mr Carlton’s wife, then?’ asked Mrs Beale, retrieving from the shop front an apple softened by the Christmas lights, thrusting it at the boy. He thanked her with a mumble and put it in his satchel. Tom hated apples. ‘No, nothing,’ Kim said. ‘I mean, there’s n
othing wrong or anything, but they don’t seem able to work out what kind of heart attack. More than a month now, dreadful, isn’t it? Poor Mr Carlton, can’t even have a funeral.’
‘Well, you look after him, sweetheart.’ Mrs Beale, hungry for scandal, delivered a grotesque wink, which Kim ignored. They moved on.
‘Oh, isn’t she awful?’ Kim muttered to Tom, and the agreement united them. He felt too old to take her hand, someone might see, so he clutched the sleeve of her coat instead.
‘What does she mean, look after him?’ he hissed, running to keep pace.
‘Just that, darling, look after him. Like he looks after us.’
At this point of accord, Tom did not risk going any further. Resentment had a habit of draining away long before he had said what he wanted to say, asked what he wanted to know. Or dared venture to Mum how he hated Uncle Pip, for everything, really. Such as putting his arms round his mother and even more particularly for that awful moment in the shop when he refused to come out for Daniel. Daniel was something else. He had been on Tom’s mind all day.
‘Did Dan come in the shop today?’
‘I didn’t see him, but Pip says he came in for his prescription this morning, so he must be OK.’ She had heard a little of the saga of Tom’s errand of mercy, but not how abruptly he had been forestalled.
‘So Uncle Pip was right, wasn’t he? Nothing to worry about.’
Nothing at all, but Kim was afflicted by the vaguest discomfort, marring yesterday’s bullishness, and the odd kind of catharsis there had been in screaming at her husband. Although she entrusted Tombo to Daniel from time to time and only out of necessity, she did not even really know where Daniel lived. Around and about; one of the clutch of bedsits above the pub, a stone’s throw, an address seen often on his record, but never quite visualised.
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