George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (17 page)

‘There’s a meeting I can’t miss,’ he said briefly, sounding for once as though he wasn’t interested in such an activity. ‘But they’ve got some results from forensic over at the big lab on Sheila’s car. I pushed ’em on it yesterday, told ’em I wasn’t prepared to wait as long as their first estimate. And apparently they’ve worked out a report on the chocolates too.’

The smile vanished from her face. ‘Well, I sure as hell hope they’ve found fingerprints there,’ she said. ‘So that they can compare them with mine and prove I had nothing to do with either one.’

‘Fingerprints don’t prove absence from the scene of a crime,’ he said. ‘Only presence. You could have used gloves.’

‘Thanks a bunch!’

‘I have to think like a devious-minded Machiavellian brief,’ he said. ‘Or one of said devious Machiavellians’ll clobber me and any case I bring from here to hell and back. And you should have known that about fingerprints anyway.’

‘I know and I do and get going,’ she said. ‘I’ve got too much to do here to put up with your pontificating at me. Let me know as soon as you can about those forensics, will you? I do have an interest after all. It’s not just idle curiosity.’

‘I will.’ He bent and kissed the back of her neck. ‘Am I forgiven for being such a bastard the other night? You’ve proven me wrong again and I grovel, like I said this morning.’

‘Too much grovelling and you’ll get a headache,’ she said. ‘Go on, scram. I’ll think about forgiveness. The jury’s still out on that one.’

‘Well, send ’em a judge’s message that it’s time they pulled their fingers out. I’ll be back as soon as I can, doll. Hope you
can find what we need there.’ He kissed her neck again and was gone.

It had seemed an interminable task when she started but in fact, as her hands moved among the piles of papers, photographs and scattered files, she found it wasn’t nearly as bad as she had expected. First, she had to sort the papers into sets, so that she at least knew the content of each subfile in the L and M letter files, and then put them into alphabetical order — or sometimes date order — internally. By the time Jerry came in with a tray of coffee for her, having realized there was no way she’d take time out to make her own, she was in fairly good order.

‘No problems inside,’ he reported. ‘We’ve had another nose around to make sure everything was ticketyboo and it is. No one was in the big lab, I’d swear to that.’

‘Good,’ she said absently, setting aside the now tidy and, as far as she could tell, complete L section (except of course for Lally Lamark’s file which she had at home) and set to work on her Ms. ‘It’s obvious that what whoever it was wanted is in here.’

‘I hope so.’ He sounded uneasy, and hovered at the door for a moment. ‘I mean, maybe they were after something else, too?’

‘I can’t think what.’ She stretched her now aching back a little. ‘We’ve nothing here anyone would want, really, have we? No interesting substances to shove up noses or give yourself a trip to wherever; nothing remotely saleable apart from big gear like microscopes, and we’re not missing anything like that, are we? That couldn’t possibly happen again — not since we put the security in place after the last time.’ That had been over three years ago but none of them had forgotten it. The microscopes were now firmly bolted in their places. ‘No one after real folding stuff would come sniffing around here now, would they?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I suppose not. Well, give me a shout if you
want anything else. We’re well up to speed with the work inside so no need to worry about that. And I called on Sheila in Ballantyne on my way to work this morning and she said they said she can go home so long as there’s someone there to make sure she’s OK. So I’ve said I’ll go and sleep on her sofa for a night or two. Thank God she’ll be too shaky still to try to entice me to sleep anywhere else.’

He made the obvious joke without any of his usual leering enthusiasm, and she, already half preoccupied with her sorting, looked at him with a brief smile and said, ‘You’re a good man, Charlie Brown,’ and returned to her task. He hesitated just a beat longer and then went.

She let the coffee get cold as she moved more and more swiftly through the job of imposing order on the chaos the interloper had created. When she had finished with the Ms she sat back on her heels and looked hard and long at the array of neatly stacked files before going through them once more, just to be absolutely sure.

There could be no doubt about it. She had been right. The file for Tony Mendez, the theatre porter who had died (she had been sure) of alcoholic poisoning, was not there. And though at the time of doing his post-mortem she had been content to accept that he had ingested the alcohol that had killed him accidentally, inasmuch as there had been no indication of a desire for deliberate self-harm, now she was not so sure. She had badly wanted to read again the notes she had made at the time, so that she could if necessary reassess the situation. It was certainly what she would do with the Lamark file as soon as she got back home. But here she had been halted, and it infuriated her.

There was still, though, she reminded herself with a surge of hope, the other set of notes. Had the intruder found them too? The F section took longer to reorganize and her heart flickered in her chest when she realized that this was the only one left that had been rifled as the M and L files had been. The others needed only a simple stacking. Nothing inside
them had been disturbed at all; that much was very clear. Unlike the F files.

Her excitement was justified. All the Fs, with the exception of just one set of notes, fell into order beneath her hands. It was the notes on the post-mortem she had done on Pamela Frean which had vanished. And vanished for good, all because, like those other two, they had not been transferred to the hospital computer. PM notes were regarded as too sensitive for detailed electronic storage apart from a brief note of the last diagnosis of cause of death; which George told herself now, was, in the circumstances, richly ironic.

She was sitting at her desk, finishing the last of her piled-up paperwork, a half-eaten apple on the desk at her side because she had had no time to go to lunch, when her door slid open. She was aware of it, but didn’t look up, assuming it to be one of the staff from the big lab, or perhaps Danny.

‘Uh-huh?’ she said after a moment, still without looking up. ‘What is it?’

‘I just wanted to check you were still on for this evening.’ The voice sounded slightly apologetic. ‘I don’t want to be a pest, but I hadn’t seen you around the place all day, and someone said there’d been a break-in here last night so I thought I really ought to leave you alone. But then I thought, well, you might be just as glad to get away from it all anyway. So here I am.’

‘Zack!’ she said, not at all sorry to be pulled away from cross-checking a long list of blood-sugar readings from the diabetic clinic that had been carried out for one of Dr Carvalho’s more esoteric pieces of research. He was always asking her to do various analyses for him but there was never any sign of a published paper afterwards; one day she intended to tackle him about that. But not today. ‘Come and sit down! How nice of you to find the time to come visiting. Coffee?’

‘It’s my pleasure,’ he said gravely. He came in and took the
chair she dragged forwards for him. ‘Thank you. And I have to say that I have Professor Hunnisett’s approval of my asking for your help.’

‘Professor Hunnisett?’ She was surprised. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I was telling him how anxious I was about making a presentation to the funders that would be lucid and interesting for them, and it was he who said I should ask your opinion. He has a very high one of his own about you.’

She became a little pink. ‘I can’t imagine why.’

‘I can! But spare your blushes. Just tell me you can help me, huh?’

‘I will if I can, of course. It’s the time problem, really. I get so — so piled up with work. Every day is packed so tightly, you know? Perhaps it’s easier for you to find holes in your day, since your main burden is research so you can plan your own work schedule?’ She was babbling, more taken aback than she would have expected at the sight of him, and the fact that he had discussed her with Hunnisett. She jumped up to switch on the kettle to make coffee for him. ‘Though, of course, I’m in the same situation too, I suppose. No patients.’

‘But I do have patients,’ he said. ‘I’ve got my research patients, remember? And I have other responsibilities in neuro. It isn’t all the Groves of Academe. I wish it were.’

She came back to sit at her desk while she waited for the kettle, which was of a temperamental nature, to deliver.

‘Oh! I suppose not. I hadn’t realized that your research subjects were in-patients.’

‘Some of them have to be. After surgery, you see.’ He saw the surprise on her face and smiled. ‘I do some implants. Fetal material into the brain, remember? I did tell you about it, I think.’

‘Yes, yes, of course you did. I’m sorry. I’ve had a lot on my mind lately.’

He looked round the room and nodded soberly. ‘I heard
you were burgled. Don’t they make a mess? Have you lost anything important?’

She bit her lip for a moment in annoyance. Dammit, as soon as she’d finished with the files she’d tidied the room and brought it back to its usual state; he was as bad as that wretched SOCO with his comments. But then she relaxed, admitting that her office wasn’t precisely shop-window perfect and knowing he was making no deliberate dig.

‘A couple of files,’ she said. ‘It’s all very odd.’

‘Odd?’

‘It’s just that — well, it’s all linked with internal affairs of Old East. Those three deaths we had that made everyone twitch so. Accidental, two of them, I thought, and one suicide. But now the notes have been stolen, I have to wonder why. I guessed last night that that was the way forward …’ She was abstracted for a moment, brooding over the problem, it’s not an easy nut to crack.’

‘Oh?’ He tilted his head like an intelligent terrier and looked at her, eyebrows up, clearly waiting for more, but she shrugged.

‘That’s about it. Missing notes on two cases.’

‘What about the third one?’ he said. ‘You did say you did all three PMs?’

‘Oh, yes. No, that’s not lost. I collected it last night to check it. But the whole of the relevant file here had been turned over, so I imagine whoever it was was looking for it. As I say, most odd.’

‘Aren’t there copies of the files you could get to replace what was taken?’

She grimaced. ‘That was what Gus said. But no. These are my private files and they don’t have any computer back-up — it’s hospital policy with PM notes.’

‘Gus?’

‘Uh — a friend. Local Superintendent of police,’ she said. ‘I’m forensic, remember, as well as hospital pathology.’

‘Oh, I knew that. I just didn’t realize you were on such close terms with the police.’

‘Close?’ She made a face, thinking of how rocky things had been with Gus lately. ‘There’s close and there’s close, isn’t there? The thing is, we work together from time to time.’

‘Ah!’ He seemed content with that, which pleased her. It wasn’t that she wanted to imply she was available, and yet… She refused to follow that thought an inch further, and concentrated on his next question instead. ‘So, he’s investigating this, then? This break-in?’

‘Yes,’ she said, eager to explain the easy things. ‘Ratcliffe Street nick are good to us at Old East. We have a special relationship, you know? They hang about when there are troubles here, which is good of them. We get more than our share of local baddies, one way and another, and it does help to have the police known on the patch as being particularly vigilant. It keeps a few of the bad guys away Or so we like to think.’

‘I’m sure.’ Now he sounded uninterested in matters to do with the police and Old East. He quirked his head again with that same terrierlike sharpness as he smiled widely. ‘So, tell me. Are you able to come along tonight as you said?’

‘Tonight? Well —’

‘Because we really would like to have your input,’ he said and his smile widened even more.

‘We?’

‘The other two in the Institute with active projects are going to rehearse tonight too. I thought you’d be able to advise us all on how we go with them. What do you say? Then, afterwards, we could go and try a different local restaurant for supper. We’ve tried Indian, right? How about Chinese? Or Caribbean? If there were a Canadian one, I’d take you there, but to tell the truth, it’d only be the same as you get at home in the States. But the choice is yours.’

‘Tonight.’ She tried to think. Was there any reason why she shouldn’t? Gus had said that he was sorry that he’d behaved as he had, but he’d been very insouciant about it. She’d told him that the jury was still out on the matter of forgiveness for
his dismissal of her anxiety last Friday over her uneaten supper; well, let it stay out a little longer. It could do no harm to accept this invitation from Zack. She wouldn’t renege on her promise to help a colleague with work. I couldn’t do that, she told herself a touch self-righteously, and why not have supper afterwards? It might be fun. And if Gus doesn’t like it, then he’ll know how it feels to be left alone in the evening.

‘I’d love to,’ she said. ‘Have supper, I mean. I said I was coming to help you tonight and of course I hadn’t forgotten. I was going to bleep you later to find out where and what time and so forth.’

‘Great.’ He got to his feet. ‘No, don’t bother with coffee. I won’t wait — but I’m delighted. Say you come over to Neuro at — what shall we say, six? The others’ll be there around six-thirty, they said, and each of them wants just half an hour for their presentation. So we’ll be free to settle down to some work around seven-thirty or so. I’ll book a table for nineish? Which restaurant?’

‘Nine it is, and you choose. I’m sorry about the coffee. This kettle really is a bitch.’

She had crossed the room to shake the kettle, as though that would speed it up, so she had her back to the door and didn’t hear it open as she chattered. Thus when she turned and saw that Gus was standing in the doorway looking interrogatively from one to the other of them, she was so startled she nearly dropped the kettle.