Second Opinion

by Claire Rayner

  Cherry stopped in the act of lifting a pile of papers and stood still. She thought for a long moment and then deliberately let them go.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it wasn’t. They were sort of — crumpled. Oh, damn. I wish I could remember properly.’

  ‘We need to help you concentrate,’ George said. ‘Sit down and let’s think.’

  Obediently Cherry sat down on the chair that was in front of the typewriter.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ George commanded and again Cherry obeyed.

  ‘Look at the memory. Build it up in your mind and look at it.’

  Cherry closed her eyes and visibly concentrated. There was a tense silence and then sadly she shook her head and opened her eyes again.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘It’s gone. All I can see now is the trays the way they are’ — she jerked her head at them — ‘Full of tidy papers. But I know that isn’t what I saw last time.’

  She sighed and swung irritably in the swivel chair. ‘I wish I could remember! It’s so silly.’ She sat with her back to George now, staring down at the typewriter keyboard and George came to stand beside her and put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘It can’t be helped, Cherry. It was only a try anyway. Don’t feel bad about it.’ It seemed to George very important now to reassure this unhappy child that she had done no wrong in being unable to remember where she had seen those coded sheets of paper; she was unhappy enough in her bereavement. To add to her burdens wouldn’t help at all.

  Cherry was fiddling now, her fingers tapping on the side of the typewriter keyboard in irritation. She was still looking very doleful and again George tried to comfort her.

  ‘It’s all right, Cherry, really it is. I’m sure we’ll find another way to sort this out. Don’t fret over it. Come on, we’d better get out of here. That movie can’t go on for ever.’

  Cherry had begun to twitch at one of the controls on the righthand side of the machine; a slide marker that went up and down. Like a fretful child she seemed to find some comfort in the repetitive movements, so George brought her own hand down over Cherry’s shoulder to set it on the restless fingers and still them.

  ‘Come on, Cherry,’ she said coaxingly. ‘Put that back the way it was so no one notices we were here, and we’ll get on our way.’

  ‘What?’ Cherry said abstractedly and looked at her hand, for the first time seeming aware that she had been fidgeting at all. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I said, put that slide bit back where it was and we’ll go.’

  ‘Back where it …’ Cherry said and peered at the machine more closely. And then to George’s dismay her shoulders began to shake. George sighed softly and bent over her, ready to comfort her again as she dissolved into further tears.

  But she wasn’t crying; she was laughing. George looked at her closely in some surprise and she had to admit a little irritation. ‘Cherry, for heaven’s sake, let’s have a bit less of this and get on our way.’

  ‘But I know what it is!’ Cherry said and turned a face to her that was wreathed in a smile. She looked like a different person; alert and alive and very very pretty, and George caught her breath, for she saw just what it was that had so captivated Harry Rajabani.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said and then straightened her back, hope lifting in her. ‘Have you remembered where you saw the papers?’

  ‘I don’t need the papers!’ Cherry said, grinning delightedly. ‘I can show you exactly how that code, or whatever it is, works! It’s not a code at all, I mean, not really, though I can see how it could be used like one.’

  George frowned, completely at sea. ‘What are you talking about, Cherry?’

  ‘I’ll show you —’ She reached for a sheet of paper from the half-open drawer beside her and moved towards the machine as though to set it in, and then stopped and looked over her shoulder.

  ‘I can’t show you here,’ she said. ‘They’ll hear me typing and Sister’ll come in and — I know. Just you wait a minute. I’ll sort it out,’ and to George’s amazement she was up on her feet and running out of the office as lightly as a child called to fetch ice cream.

  George followed her, and saw her stop at the door to the bay where the watchers were still happily wrapped up in their fantasy world, straighten her shoulders, and then slip in and go straight over to Sister Lichfield. Cherry bent and murmured into her ear and Sister listened, looked briefly over her shoulder at George, made a face and then nodded.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘As long as you do bring it right back.’

  ‘Oh, I will,’ Cherry said. She smiled widely and escaped back to the office.

  Sister looked at George and nodded. ‘Glad to be of help, doctor,’ she said, and then turned back to look at the TV screen as the sound of a sudden squealing of brakes was greeted by laughter from all the patients and other staff who had paid no attention at all to the little flurry of activity.

  George said, ‘Thank you,’ mechanically to Sister’s back and turned to go back into the office only to meet Cherry coming out. She was clutching the heavy typewriter in her arms, and she muttered at George, ‘You go ahead and open the doors. I’ll be fine. I only need it for a bit — but do be quick! It’s ever so heavy.’

  They reached the little cubby hole that was Cherry’s office just in time. Cherry, red in the face with the effort, almost dropped the machine on her desk once George had pushed the word processor keyboard and screen there well to the back out of the way. Cherry let out a puff of exhausted breath. ‘Blimey, that thing’s a lump!’ she said.

  ‘Why on earth bring it here?’ George asked. ‘What’s the — oh, silly question. To use it, of course.’

  ‘Of course! I told Sister mine got broken and you had an urgent report Dr Arundel needed and no typist on duty on account of Christmas, and she said all right. Mustn’t keep it too long, though. Now, let’s see.’

  She began to fiddle at the side of the machine, looking for the flex, plugged it in and switched the power on.

  ‘Now,’ she said, and sat down at the keyboard with a little flourish like a stage magician about to pull a dove out of a hat. ‘Just you watch.’

  She took a piece of paper from her own drawer, put it in the machine and then turned her attention to the slide at the right-hand side with which she had been fidgeting. ‘Look at this, will you, Dr Barnabas?’

  George looked. On the left hand of the slide there was a column of figures and letters. The bottom one was 10, the one above it 12 and the one above that 15. At the top of the column were the letters PS.

  Cherry moved the slide so that it stood alongside PS. ‘That means proportional spacing. It’s something to do with getting the letters all the same size, apparently. I’ve never found out how it works, on account of no one ever asked for the proportional spacing. You need a special daisy wheel for it, anyway. But just you watch what happens when you use it.’ And she began to type.

  George stood there and watched her fingers. Cherry did not type quickly, but with a certain deliberation. As she hit each key, George could see which one it was; and realized almost at once that it was the basic phrase that offered every letter of the alphabet: ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy white dog’.

  But that was not what appeared on the white paper. She stood there fascinated and saw the symbols appear:

  ACH >@L, (¼ GF£R UF. E@” ]S F[HG ACH OPZ& £CLAH YF$

  ‘Good God!’ she said blankly.

  Cherry leaned back in her chair and spread her hands wide to display what she had done. ‘You see? It’s one of those things that happens with these machines. I used to have one, but Dr Arundel got me that word processor. You see? But I had one of these ages ago and it happened to me a few times when I hit the slide by accident. It can happen — it’s awful on a word processor or a computer if you hit the wrong key, mind. You can make terrific mistakes.’

  ‘Like getting blood sugar readings matched to the wrong patient’s name,’ George said with a combined flash of insigh
t and memory.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, something that happened in the Diabetic Clinic a while ago — it was a computer error.’

  ‘Well, there you are then.’ Cherry looked very pleased with herself. ‘Like this, eh? This is a typing error, though, not a computer one. I used to make them a lot. I used to type a page — well some of a page — in the days when I still wasn’t a very good typist and I looked at the keyboard more’n I looked at the page, you know? And I used to get so bothered! I’d pull the pages out and crumple them up and chuck them in the bottom of my tray and try again. That’s what I think I must have remembered — seeing my crumpled up pages chucked in the tray. Once I knew what did it, of course, I never had the problem no more.’

  She pushed the slide down again till it was opposite 12 and again typed: ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy white dog’; and this time the letters appeared exactly as they should.

  ‘Someone else discovered this and used it,’ George said, with absolute certainty. ‘They made the same mistake and saw how useful it could be and just typed what they wanted to keep, but to keep secretly, and it came out like this and they thought no one’d ever work out what it was. All they had to do was change the letters back to read it.’

  ‘I reckon!’ said a jubilant Cherry. ‘Well, did I get it right or did I?’

  George leaned over and hugged her, and Cherry, after a moment’s tension, hugged her back.

  ‘You was right, you know,’ she said when she’d extracted herself. She looked up at George with a little grimace. ‘It does help.’

  ‘Pardon me?’ George was puzzled.

  ‘Doing a crossword puzzle. I said before I didn’t care who killed Harry. That finding out who it was and all that would just be a sort of revenge. But it’s not true, is it?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ George said. ‘No. It isn’t. Getting the truth about something mayn’t change what happened, but it does help you. It’s why I do the job I do, I think. Needing to find out things. I can’t bear mysteries. At least —’ She stopped to think, then went on with some embarrassment. ‘I have to be honest, I love them really. As long as they’re solvable. I enjoy the business of sorting out the tangles. I’m the sort who’d take a plate of spaghetti and try to arrange every strand neatly if I could. There’s real satisfaction in untangling things, I guess. I might lose sight sometimes of what it means to the people inside the mystery, though. People like you. I’m sorry if —’

  ‘You don’t have to apologize for nothing!’ Cherry said strongly. ‘I told you, I felt better sorting that out than I could have ever thought I could. Thanks for helping me, Dr Barnabas. You’ve been good to me. I’m ever so grateful.’

  ‘No need,’ George said gruffly, as embarrassed as if she’d been English through and through. ‘No need at all. Listen, Cherry, I need a bit more help. Will you type some more of that stuff for me? I need, oh, several rows with lots of space underneath. Then underneath, type the letters the way they should be OK? Then I’ll sit down with those sheets of paper I’ve got and it shouldn’t take too long to work out what’s really on them.’

  ‘Sure,’ Cherry said, and seemed a little embarrassed herself and glad to have something practical to do, and she set to work to provide precisely what George had asked for. A few minutes later, George had in front of her a sheet of paper on which had been typed several times:

  ACH >@L, ( ¼ GF£R UF. E@” ]S F[HG ACH OPZ £CLAH YF$K

  THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY WHITE DOG.

  ‘Look at the bottom,’ Cherry said. ‘I’ve done it different there. It’ll make it easier for you.’

  George looked again and smiled widely. ‘I should have thought of that,’ she said and looked at it appreciatively:

  P ¼, YHU$CLE(0”RF]>GSA@[£. &ZK y-, 1340562

  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. 1234567890

  ‘The spacing’s different so you’ll have to be careful,’ Cherry said. ‘But I reckon you should manage all right. Shall I help you? With the code? I mean, doing the pages you’ve got?’

  George bit her lip and frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ she said candidly. ‘Oh, hell, that sounds awful, doesn’t it? But this is a murder enquiry and —’

  Cherry looked stricken and George put out a hand to reassure her. ‘It’s all right, Cherry. No one thinks for a moment that you had anything to do with anything you shouldn’t, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just that — it’s police work, you see. I’d be glad of help, to tell the truth, but I can’t let you —’

  ‘Oh,’ Cherry said. ‘I didn’t realize you were part of the police.’

  George looked at her for a long moment and then grimaced. ‘Ouch. Well, OK, not directly, I suppose. Not the police. But I am part of the machinery of investigation. It’s normal for me to be part of the job police do. I don’t mean to suggest that you were in any way —’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Cherry said. She was beginning to lose the sparkle that the typewriter episode had given her, drooping again like a plant starved of light and water. ‘It doesn’t matter, after all.’

  ‘But it does,’ George said softly and put out a hand to pull Cherry to her feet. ‘Come on. Time to take that machine back. I’ll carry it this time.’ After a long silent moment Cherry looked up at her, nodded and got to her feet. She looked depressed again now, but at least, George told herself as she humped the heavy machine into her arms ready for the trek back to Maternity, it’s helped her a bit to be involved this far, even if I can’t let her help me with the deciphering. Maybe I’m being too careful; and for a moment she considered telling Cherry it was all right, after all, she could be involved, but then hardened her resolve. All her instincts were to keep any information she might garner for Gus before letting anyone else in on it, and she trusted her instincts. It was an odd business, she mused, investigating a murder when you had to worry about the bereaved as well as the corpse.

  29

  George walked over to the police station via Wapping High Street, stopping on the way at the ‘Golden Palace’ where Lee Ho Chin, one of the regular patients in Mr Agnew Byford’s cardiology clinic offered special deals to the staff of Old East. It was her turn, she decided, to take food to Gus; high time she showed him he wasn’t the only one who remembered to look after the inner man and woman. Her lips quirked as the phrase came into her mind; it had been used by the Chairman at the Players Theatre that night, announcing the interval and time for refreshment for said inner residents, and she had a silly vision of a small version of herself, sitting somewhere inside her belly, looking up hopefully for what might be offered from above. It was amusing now to imagine a small Gus, sitting gloomy with hunger, waiting for something to make him feel better, and her step quickened as she saw the soft glow of light from the stained windows of Lee Ho Chin’s restaurant.

  She sat and waited for her order as Lee, friendly and communicative but almost impossible to comprehend, chattered busily at her, and went on her way with her little carrier bag full of aluminium containers and a hot egg roll wrapped in a paper napkin, which Lee had pushed into her hand as she left. (‘To keep you warm as you go,’ he insisted. ‘Good luck for good lady.’) She ate it as she made her way through the icy streets. There were Christmas trees in the windows she passed, looking as bedraggled to her eyes as the ones in the hospital now that Christmas was over, but that sight didn’t depress her as it usually did. She was on her way to see Gus and that was an exhilarating thought.

  She found him in his office, alone in the middle of the big department with its huddles of cluttered desks and battered wall charts and scattered files, and stood for a moment looking at him from the far doorway of the empty main room, which usually was occupied by the other members of the plainclothes division, and tried to analyse how she felt about what she was looking at. It was difficult. He looked endearingly crumpled, with his shirt sleeves pushed up above his elbows to show strong rather hairy forearms, and his hair was untidy, but at the same time he looked str
ong and reliable. She sighed. Better not to think too much at all about him. Just enjoy the way things were and wait and see.

  ‘Egg rolls,’ she announced as she marched into his office. ‘And chicken chop suey, and chopped prawn balls. Oh, and some noodles and a few prawn crackers.’

  ‘Wot, no sweet and sour?’ he said, not lifting his head from his work. ‘No won ton? What sort of a nosh-up d’you call that? We’d ha’ done better with some stuff from Leman Street. Nice bit o’ haddock, maybe? But that’ll do.’ He pushed his work away and stretched. ‘Beer with it, or a drop o’ tea?’

  ‘Beer, you ungrateful lug,’ she said, beginning to unload her bag on to his desk. ‘You don’t deserve anything. When you feed me, don’t I show a decent gratitude? Don’t I make it clear how much I appreciate your thoughtfulness? Don’t I —’

  ‘No you do not,’ he said. ‘That’s why I don’t. Hey, listen, what’s this? No chopsticks? Never mind — let’s see what we can do.’ He pulled open his desk drawer to rummage and eventually came up with four chopsticks. ‘There! Knew I had some somewhere.’ He wiped them on the sleeve of his shirt and handed her a pair. ‘Dead hygienic now. Hey, this looks a bit of all right. I’ll forgive you the missing won ton and sweet and sour. This’ll do nicely.’

  ‘Where is everyone?’ she said as he filled his mouth with hot noodles. ‘Why are you on your own? Everyone out clue-hunting?’

  ‘I’ve sent ‘em home,’ he said and collected another mouthful. ‘On call if there’s any problems, but I saw no need to keep ‘em sitting here. There’s a uniformed watch on that can manage well enough. And my lads — well, it’s Christmas, ‘n’t it? I’ll work their butts off next week, but till the New Year’s behind us, it pays to be nice to the buggers.’

  She smiled at him over her own noodles and said jeeringly, ‘So, go pull the other one three times till it plays ‘Yankee Doodle”! You’re just a softie, spoiling your guys because you’re a — well, a softie!’