A Bleeding of Innocents (15 page)

‘How long have you been here, Mr Hawley?'

The administrator didn't need to use his fingers. Donovan thought he could have said to the nearest week. ‘A little over eight years.'

‘So you were here at the time of the mass extinctions.'

Hawley stared at him and his grey moustache gave a quiver of disfavour. ‘I beg your pardon?'

In the circumstances it wasn't the most tasteful remark ever made. Still Donovan was struck by the way one era had given way to another four years ago. ‘Like the dinosaurs,' he explained. ‘One minute – geologically speaking – you see them, the next you don't. It must have been a bit like that here when Kerry Carson left to do geriatrics, Staff Nurse Petrie took her place, Dr White joined the team, and presumably the last anaesthetist left. That's not normal, is it? What was going on?'

Hawley's moustache bristled with outrage. ‘I don't know what you're suggesting, Sergeant Donovan. Going on? Nothing was going on. We had some staff changes. It happens all the time. This is a big hospital.'

‘But that's one small surgical team and the only member of it to survive the purge was Maggie Board. And now she and Kerry Page are dead, both murdered by the same sort of weapon inside two days. You're not telling me that's par for the course?'

‘What I will tell you, Sergeant,' the administrator said stiffly, ‘is that I resent your attitude. We've had a tragedy here. A double tragedy, if you like – though Mrs Page was no longer on staff there are plenty of us who remember her. From where I stand it's obvious what's going on: there's a madman roaming Castlemere with a shot-gun and a grudge against medical staff. Why, instead of finding that person and putting him where he can do no further damage, you're asking me about staff changes here four years ago I cannot imagine.'

Donovan's eyes were scornful. ‘Oh, come on. Four years ago a girl who'd wanted to be a theatre nurse since she was in pigtails suddenly decided to jack it in. At the same time a vacancy arose for another anaesthetist. Something happened, didn't it? Something happened, and because of it Maggie Board the perfectionist wouldn't have them on her team again. What was it? And how was Kerry able to get a good job a couple of months later that wouldn't have been offered her unless there'd been a cover-up?'

Hawley's voice had gone bleak, grey as the little grey moustache jutting over his lip. He was a spare man of about fifty with thinning grey hair clipped ruthlessly to a bullet-shaped head. He wore a grey suit that would have run a mile from a puking child. Of course, he was not a doctor.

‘You're fantasizing, Sergeant. I appreciate that you have to explore the possibilities, and this matter is urgent enough to justify any approach which might yield results. But you're barking up the wrong tree. If Mrs Board had been let down by her colleagues, do you imagine she'd have permitted a cover-up? Even if I or anyone else had been prepared to sanction one?

‘No, Sergeant. Dr Saunders, who was Mrs Board's regular anaesthetist before Dr White, left Castle General because of an attractive offer from the Feyd Clinic, and Staff Nurse Carson transferred to geriatrics because theatre work turned out to be more stressful than she expected. That's all. I'm sorry it's so mundane. The truth often is.'

‘Yeah,' agreed Donovan. ‘And sometimes it's so bloody incredible nobody'll believe it till it's too late. Who's this Dr Saunders? Maybe I should have a word with the only surviving member of the team before our madman mistakes
him
for a nurse and blows his head off too.'

Liz put the phone down and looked up at Donovan, who was standing sullenly beside the door, leaning his shoulder against the wall, cradling his plaster with his good arm. She said evenly, ‘How long have you been in Castlemere, Sergeant?'

His eyes were guarded. ‘Five years.'

She nodded thoughtfully. ‘And is there anyone left of rank or substance in the town whom you have yet to offend? I don't want to interfere with any ambitions you have in that regard.'

He indicated the phone. ‘Hawley?' He'd come in midway through the call, tried to leave, and been firmly waved inside.

Liz breathed heavily. ‘Yes, that was Mr Hawley. I think he'd like your body for medical research. Soon.'

‘He's hiding something,' said Donovan.

‘He said you were under that impression. He said that if I thought there was a hospital connection he'd cooperate in any way he could. He offered to show me his records for the period when Mrs Board and Kerry Carson worked together with this anaesthetist – Saunders? For a man who's hiding something it was a good impression of someone with a clear conscience.'

‘Cunning bastard,' growled Donovan.

Liz sighed. ‘There are two types that look like an innocent man, Donovan. One is indeed a cunning bastard. The other is an innocent man.'

Donovan levered himself off the wall. ‘Look, this isn't about my nasty suspicious mind, or a hospital administrator who was damn reluctant to answer a couple of questions until he'd had time to think about it. It's about Kerry Page and Maggie Board being murdered in the same way in the same week. That's either a cosmic coincidence or it's because of something they have in common. That time four years ago when they worked together, and then all at once the anaesthetist was off in one direction and the nurse in another, seemed a good place to look. Now, as a line of enquiry, what is
wrong
with that?'

‘And where does Jack Carney fit into it?'

Donovan shot her a hunted look. ‘He does, I know he does; I just don't know how. Neither the anaesthetist nor the nurse saw anything wrong when Board was working on Alan, they'd have said if they had. But if she didn't know Carney, why did he kill her? Or if he didn't, who did? There's something going on at that hospital. I just don't believe in a serial killer who could see well enough to distinguish Kerry Page from her husband in a car on a dark night but thought Maggie Board was a nurse. And if he went to the trouble of following the Pages to a country car park late at night, why was he so casual about his second victim that he shot her in the middle of town in broad daylight?'

It was a valid point. The trouble with Donovan, Liz was discovering, was that most of his points were valid: it was his conclusions that had to be treated with caution.

‘All right,' she said. ‘So we've three possibilities: that these murders are the work of a psychopath with a nurse fetish, that Carney's behind them, or they're connected with whatever split that surgical team four years ago. Who's the killer, then?'

‘Depends what happened and who it happened to.'

‘Yes, quite. But someone who – what, considered himself their victim? Someone whose operation was bungled?'

Donovan's eyebrows were sceptical. ‘I've heard of sleeping on a decision but not for four years.'

Liz agreed. ‘It doesn't sound too likely, does it? Unless for some reason this was his first chance. Could he have been in hospital till now?'

‘Four years is a long time to be laid up. I don't think most people leaving hospital after four years would be fit to commit two murders.'

Liz nodded slowly. ‘So who else would want to kill an entire surgical team?'

‘Next of kin? If he's been looking after the victim, maybe he was too busy to do anything till now.'

Liz continued the thought almost seamlessly. ‘If he cared enough about that person to kill those he blamed, he couldn't do anything that might result in him being put away while he was still needed. Suppose what changed after four years was that he wasn't needed any longer: his dependent either went into residential care or died. So our man was free to do what he'd been itching to do for four years.'

Donovan was watching her with genuine respect. ‘That could work. How do we find out?'

‘You go see Dr Saunders,' decided Liz. ‘Forget what I said about not bullying people: bully him as much as you like but find out what happened in the theatre that made those three people split up. And ask him why he was seeing Kerry Page.'

The Sergeant looked surprised. ‘Do we know he was?'

‘She was seeing a doctor, not professionally. If it was Saunders it must be something to do with this.'

‘Could she have been blackmailing him? If he was responsible for the incident that split them up?'

Liz frowned. ‘It doesn't altogether fit with what we've been told about the girl. But yes, if Saunders made a mistake and Kerry covered for him it would give her a hold on him. Especially now he's doing nicely in the lucrative world of private medicine.'

‘Blackmailers don't have lunch with their victims. They don't invite them to their homes while their husbands are out.'

‘Which makes him sound more like a lover. But maybe not. He knew her, there was no point setting up an elaborate blind if he knew where to find her. Perhaps she misjudged him. Perhaps she thought he'd pay up quietly and instead he killed her.' She scowled. ‘But why then did he murder Mrs Board?'

‘Maybe he reckoned he had to. When she had time to think about Kerry's death she'd guess who had a reason to kill her.'

Liz wasn't happy with it. ‘We hit the same problem: why would Kerry Page wait three years to put the screw on? Perrin first saw her visitor a year ago. And why would he pay up for twelve months, then take her out to lunch, then kill her?'

‘Maybe she asked for more money.'

‘Why?'

‘If she knew about Page's partnership.'

‘She was blackmailing Saunders to buy her husband a share in his firm?' Her voice wavered on the edge of doubt. ‘Hell, Donovan, I don't know. That's an awful lot of guesswork.'

‘It would work,' Donovan said slowly, ‘if Kerry Page wasn't the sweet kind girl we've been told she was and if Dr Saunders was a man who'd commit murder rather than give up a life style he was fond of. We'll have a better idea about that when I've seen him. Then maybe I should talk to Page again.'

‘And I'll take Mr Hawley up on his offer and go study his records,' said Liz. ‘This whole blackmail business is pure conjecture. If Kerry and Saunders turn out to have been lovers we're back to looking for someone with a grudge. In which case his name, or that of someone he loved, should appear on the theatre list shortly before the team split up.'

‘Modern surgery's a production line,' objected Donovan, ‘there'll be dozens of them. How will you know which one they cocked up?'

‘I'll ask Mr Hawley,' Liz said.

Almost the first thing Shapiro had done after he left his detective inspector dead and his detective sergeant drifting in and out of consciousness in the hospital was interview Jack Carney. That time he had gone to the man's office, and had been received almost as courteously as Liz Graham would be four days later. He had, as Shapiro expected, a sound alibi: not so much Mrs Carney, who might have been willing to lie for him, as the doctor she summoned when Carney suffered palpitations in the middle of the night. As he was leaving the house the doctor, a locum with no known connections to either the Carney empire or the surgical department of Castle General, also saw McMeekin, half-dressed and apparently half-asleep, disturbed from his bed in the staff wing and anxious about his employer. It wasn't as good an alibi for McMeekin as for Carney but it was probably as good as it could have been without exciting suspicion.

This time Shapiro didn't go to Carney's office, he went to his house, and the welcome was measureably cooler. It became downright chilly when he announced the purpose of his visit. They were in Carney's study: just the two of them, for once McMeekin was occupied elsewhere. The little man went a livid greyish-pink colour – perhaps the palpitations were not an invention – and his voice sank to a viperish rasp.

‘You've come here – to my house, to my wife's house – to accuse me of – what? Having an affair with this woman, this Mrs Board? You and I have had our disagreements before this, Mr Shapiro, but I never expected that kind of vindictiveness from you. With all your unwarranted interest in my business concerns, you've never sunk to attacking my family life before.'

‘I've no wish to be vindictive,' Shapiro said stolidly. ‘But I do want an answer to my question. Did you know Maggie Board, professionally, personally, or in any other way? I should warn you I have other officers out making the same enquiry in places where Mrs Board was known. If it's true you'd be better telling me now.'

Carney came to his feet behind his writing table, spilling his chair in his fury. ‘God damn you, Shapiro! You've got people going round this town – my town, the place where I live – making an allegation like that about me?'

Shapiro, who had watched Jack Carney field accusations of vice, corruption, racketeering, drug dealing, and having people's legs broken without flickering an eyelid, without ever letting the confident little half-smile slip from his lips, was surprised at the violence of his reaction. In another man it might have signalled a guilty conscience. But guilt was Carney's natural state, something he was at ease with. Shapiro rather suspected that if it was true he'd have been better prepared for the question, would not have betrayed his feelings like this.

‘Making enquiries,' he said, pedantically. ‘We do it all the time. Sometimes our enquiries lead to allegations, sometimes they don't. It depends on the answers we get.'

‘I'll give you my answer now,' said Carney, fast and hard. ‘I have never had an affair, with this woman or any other. As far as I know I've never met Mrs Board. I've certainly never spent time with her. And in case that's your next question, I didn't have someone blow her head off with a shot-gun.'

Shapiro sniffed. ‘It wasn't my next question. But I'd have got there eventually.'