George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (37 page)

‘So I understand,’ Miss Chambers snapped. ‘This way, if you please.’

She led them back along the corridor to another closed door, this time on the other side, opened it with a key attached to her waist by a long chain and held it open so that they could all file in ahead of her.

‘Well now, Miss Chambers,’ Gus said. He looked around for a chair, found one and immediately sat in it. DC Hagerty went and stood behind him and George, after a moment, closed the door behind Miss Chambers and leaned on it. Miss Chambers looked slightly alarmed, but controlled it well. She went to sit on the other chair behind the desk, crossing her legs as she did so to provide a goodly view of them. George had to admit they weren’t bad, but found the display irritating, though she wasn’t quite sure why.

‘Well?’ Miss Chambers said crisply. ‘What can I do for you?’

Gus set down in the middle of the desk the little buff card he had found among Tony Mendez’s things in the locker at Old East. ‘Tell me about that,’ he said.

She leaned over, looked at it but made no attempt to pick it up. ‘A joke,’ she said calmly after a while. ‘A sort of joke to gloss a service we offer here at St Dymphna’s.’

‘Perhaps you could explain the joke?’ Gus said.

‘Why? Where did you get the card from?’

‘I asked first,’ he said. ‘If you’re helpful now, you might get to ask questions later on. Maybe. So, the joke?’

She sighed and recrossed her legs. ‘It’s really very feeble. This ward is for the treatment of people with addictions. Alcohol mainly, but also recreational drugs. We get a number of well-known people who need their identities — um — protected, so we use the initials of the unit in all our dealings with patients and outside. Now, when they are stable, shall we say, and can function normally with adequate control of their alcohol intake, and are able to leave us, we don’t leave them. We make sure they have a lifeline back here. Each and every patient is given my mobile phone number so that in an emergency, at any time of day or night, someone is available to ensure they have someone to talk to. Not necessarily me. Sometimes I put them on to other people in the team — it depends on, well, whatever. Anyway, I make sure they can handle their crisis. That is what the card is about.’

‘Yes. That’s what you told me last night,’ Gus said, staring at the card. ‘But I’m still not entirely satisfied.’

Miss Chambers sat up more straight, uncrossing her legs and setting her feet firmly on the ground, for the first time forgetting what she might look like. ‘That was you who called last night?’

‘It was,’ Gus said and beamed. ‘But it’s this club bit that puzzles me. And what’s the joke? You still haven’t explained what’s funny.’

‘Oh.’ She threw up one hand in a gesture of irritation. ‘It’s silly. It’s just that we don’t enjoin total abstention from alcohol here. We teach social and controlled use of alcohol. So they — the patients — years ago came up with a different meaning for SDAW.’

‘Which is?’ he prompted.

There was a long pause, and Gus lifted his brows at her. She bit her lip. ‘Small drinks are wonderful,’ she said unwillingly at last.

Gus stared at her and then looked over his shoulder at George. ‘So he hadn’t been dry! Does that make the difference?’

‘I think it might,’ George said slowly and came forward. ‘It all depends on how much he was drinking. I know everyone at Old East
thought
he was dry. That was what was said about him. I think they all assumed AA.’

‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat,’ Sonia Chambers said crossly. ‘And to treat alcoholics. We think they can be safe social drinkers, and we have excellent results. We’re not in the never-more approach like AA. And we’re not the only workers in the field who think this. There’s Drinkwatchers and —’

‘I’m sure,’ Gus said absently, clearly uninterested in any debate over methods of treating alcohol addiction. ‘But it explains why he hid his tipple the way he did. To make them think there he was a total abstainer. That was probably a condition of his employment.’

‘And someone who knew that was able to spike his booze,’ George finished. ‘Which makes it murder, undoubtedly.’

Sonia Chambers sat up very straight. ‘Murder?’ she squeaked. Everyone ignored her.

‘It’s why I assumed, I have to admit, that the fact he’d taken any alcohol at all was an indication that he’d simply slipped from the path of virtue and it wouldn’t take much to knock him out. I didn’t look much further for any indications that he’d been given a heavy dose of alcohol. Dammit, dammit, dammit. I’ll
never
let previous assumptions affect me like that
again!’ She spoke almost violently, ashamed to have been caught out in such a professional blunder. ‘I put it down to accident simply because —’

‘No need to whip yourself,’ Gus said mildly. ‘We’ve got it sussed now, that’s the thing.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Sonia Chambers said. She looked from one to the other, clearly put out. ‘You’d think one of them might have told me.’

‘Who? Told you what?’ Gus said.

‘Why, that someone, one of my people, had died. I’m the senior co-ordinator of the project — the support project — and you’d have thought someone would have told me there’d been a death.’

‘Well, who would have told you? Maybe they didn’t know about the club. And I don’t suppose, even if they had, the murderer would have phoned and said, “Oh, by the way, let them know at the SDAW Club that I’ve just bumped off Tony Mendez.’”

‘Tony Mendez?’ she said, and her face tightened. ‘Oh, no! He was one of our best successes! He’d been in steady employment for years and managing to control his drinking beautifully. Oh, they should have told me!’

‘
Who
should have told you?’ Gus said again patiently.

She looked at him vaguely and then away, still lost in her own sense of outrage. ‘Oh, someone who knew he was one of mine, of course. Someone from Old East. They could have told me. When did it happen?’

He ignored the question but sat up very straight and stared at her. ‘Someone from Old East? You’ve got other people who are involved with that hospital working here? Who?’

‘I can’t betray confidences.’

‘You bloody can!’ Gus said in a sudden barely controlled rage that made Sonia Chambers blink and move back a little. ‘This is a murder enquiry, lady. So tell me,
who?’

‘The doctors,’ she said lamely. ‘The doctors could have told me.’

‘Which doctors?’ He almost roared it.

‘Well, there’s Dr Klein. He might have said — only of course not being surgical, p’raps … But Jim would have known. He’s always in the theatres and that was where Tony worked, wasn’t it?’

‘Jim who?’ Gus said in the dangerous tone of a man whose patience was wearing rather thin.

‘Jim Corton,’ Sonia Chambers said. ‘The anaesthetist, you know. Jim Corton.’

‘I’ve got to go, damn it,’ Gus said fretfully, looking at his watch. ‘I’ve got to talk to this woman till she turns inside out and there isn’t an atom of information left in her, but I’m due at the Yard and I can’t muck about with that. Listen, Hagerty, make a date with her to come into Ratcliffe Street when I can talk to her. Take a gander at my diary and fix it up with Mike Urquhart, OK?’

‘I can talk to her,’ George said eagerly. ‘Let me try and find out —’

He shook his head. ‘Got to be a proper statement, ducks, you know that. She’ll have to come in. Is she on her way back, Hagerty?’

DC Hagerty poked his head out of the office door and looked both ways down the corridor. ‘No sign of her, Guv,’ he reported.

‘Then go and haul her out of wherever she is. I won’t be mucked around like this.’ He sounded wrathful suddenly. ‘Going off like that — who does she think she is?’

‘A hospital social worker on duty called to deal with some sort of crisis, perhaps?’ George said. ‘Other people do have their jobs to do, you know, even if they are needed to assist the police with their enquiries.’

‘Hmph,’ said Gus, unimpressed. ‘If she doesn’t get back here soon I’ll have her for interfering with the police in their bloody enquiries.’

‘Klein,’ George said almost to herself. She had walked over to the window to stare down at the gardens below, where a few patients were sitting out in the sunshine, which was still comfortable enough to enjoy; by mid afternoon no doubt it would be sweltering again with temperatures up in the eighties, making everyone irritable. But at present it looked peaceful and pretty down there; not remotely like Old East’s battered exterior. ‘Klein. I never thought of him as a possible suspect, but he could be.’

‘Tell me about him,’ Gus said, looking irritably at his watch again.

‘You remember him. He was at Hattie and Sam’s dinner party, the one Zack brought along because he had nowhere to go that evening.’

‘Oh, that bloke!’ Gus lifted his head, clearly forgetting the press of time for a moment. ‘He seemed pleasant enough. Shy, quietish type.’

‘That’s as may be,’ George said. ‘But he’s a researcher and he’s got his own fish to fry. Maybe he had a reason to go after Tony Mendez …’ Her voice drifted away as she thought.

‘What sort of reason?’

‘How can I say at this stage? I need time to think.’

‘And it isn’t just Mendez we’re concerned about. There’re the others. Pam and Lally and of course our Sheila.’

‘Yes …’ George went on staring sightlessly down into the garden. There was a lot to think about. Sonia Chambers’s information had changed everything; she frowned as she considered it.

‘And this other chap, Jim Corton, was it?’

‘Yes.’ George had been thinking about him too. ‘That really doesn’t make any sort of sense.’ She turned back into the room and looked at him. ‘He has to be the most nerdy and helpless of characters I’ve ever met. I can’t imagine that boy having the nous to argue with a storekeeper who gave him
short change, let alone spiking someone’s drink or fiddling with a diabetic’s insulin gear.’

‘It’s always the most unlikely suspect what dunnit in the best TV ’tec drama,’ Gus said. He got to his feet as footsteps came rattling up the corridor outside. The door was pushed open and Sonia Chambers came in looking ruffled and tense, followed by Hagerty. Gus smiled at her charmingly, all signs of his earlier rather hectoring manner quite gone.

‘Sorted out the emergency?’ he said sweetly.

‘Well, in a way. For the moment, at any rate. That man has been known to go berserk before, and for some reason I’m the only one he’ll listen to.’ She almost smirked, but her pride in her ability as a soother of angry patients vanished under her anxiety about Gus. She looked at him warily now, and edged her way back behind her desk as though it were a bulwark that would keep her safe from danger. ‘Is that all then? You’ll be on your way?’

‘Oh, I’m on my way’ Gus smiled the same cheerful grin. ‘Because I have an urgent appointment. At Scotland Yard, you know’ He bared his teeth even more widely and she seemed to shrink a little as she stared at him, almost mesmerized. ‘But we haven’t finished, of course. Oh, no. There are lots of things I’d dearly love to discuss with you. So, my DC Hagerty here will take you back to the nick — to Ratcliffe Street — and make a proper appointment for you to come in and make a statement for us. I’m sure you’ll be happy to do that?’

She blinked. ‘A statement? But I don’t know anything.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there’ll be something,’ he said reassuringly. ‘And it won’t take too long. A few hours.’

‘A few — Look, I can’t — I mean, couldn’t I just do it on the phone?’ She sounded almost in despair. ‘I’m the senior social worker here and I really can’t go gadding about, you know. You see what happened just now when Ishmael took one of his mad turns. I was the one they had to send for. I really can’t
waste the hospital’s time, you know, and anyway, my clients need me.’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Gus said handsomely. ‘You don’t need to go to the station now. I’ll get DC Hagerty to phone and make an appointment for you to come in that way. There! That’s better, isn’t it? Now I must go. I’ll see you as and when, Miss Chambers, as and when! Hagerty, see to that appointment, right?’ He looked at the DC with mock severity and then turned to George. ‘I’ll let you see yourself out with Hagerty, Dr B.? I really must skedaddle. See you later.’ And he flicked his thumb and forefinger at his forehead and went, like a flurry of March wind that leaves everyone breathless in its wake.

There was a silence in the small office and then Hagerty coughed. He looked from one woman to the other. ‘We’ll be going then, doctor?’ he said.

‘I’ll follow you.’ George smiled at him in what she hoped was a relaxed yet winning manner. ‘You go ahead. Don’t let me hold you up.’

Hagerty looked at her doubtfully, opened his mouth to protest that he was sure the Guv expected George to leave with him, caught a glint in her eyes and decided to be prudent. Any rows the Guv wanted to have with the doctor were his affair, he thought, and gave a small shrug. ‘I’ll be going then. I’ll — er — phone you when I get to the station, Miss Chambers, and make that arrangement.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Miss Chambers had settled in her chair now, sitting in a slumped sort of way, not posing her handsome legs at all and looking rather smaller than she had, as though she had been air-filled and some had leaked away. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Good morning,’ Hagerty said. He gave one more uncertain look at George and went. George stayed where she was, leaning against the window, saying nothing, just looking at Sonia Chambers.

It was almost a full minute — an unconscionable time,
George felt as it ticked away — before she stirred and raised her head to look at George. It was clear she had been hoping George would follow Hagerty, and now she stared up with a wary expression on her face.

‘Was there something else?’ she said, her voice carefully controlled.

‘Well, yes,’ George said. ‘I’m glad you asked that. There are a few things I’d like to talk to you about, now the guys have gone. It’s so much easier when it’s just a couple of women, don’t you reckon? You know where you are with women.’

Sonia Chambers looked unconvinced by this attempt to create cosiness and George tried again.