Nor All Your Tears (13 page)

I must admit that I lapsed into a little bit more gaping. ‘You are kidding, aren't you? First Marlene Jeffries, then Yvette Mangon? Two women who worked together, lived together and . . .'

She smiled despite herself. ‘Played together?'

‘You could put it like that.'

‘And their deaths aren't connected?' My question had gone into a slightly higher register than normal.

For a moment, I think she was going to argue, but all she said was, ‘Officially, George Cotterill is still a suspect in the murder of Marlene Jeffries.'

‘Two murderers? Is that likely?'

‘No,' she admitted. ‘But then, statistically speaking, murder is a very unlikely occurrence, anyway.'

I knew enough statistical theory not to try arguing, even though it sounded slightly on the side of sophistry to me. ‘Is that the theory that Masson's working on?'

Her smile said it all; her only vocal response wasn't one at all. ‘I don't think Inspector Masson would appreciate me discussing the lines of enquiry concerning the murders. I just came here to take your statement regarding the death of George Cotterill.'

‘Has she gone?' Max, no less frosty than before, came down from her bath, dressed only a towelling bath robe.

‘She has.' I was laying the table for our supper, which was to be a cheese salad; I hoped this would not overtax my culinary abilities, but was prepared to be disappointed. She might have snorted, might not have done; it was difficult for me to tell. ‘What's wrong?'

‘Nothing.' She said this too quickly, too flatly.

‘Yes, there is.'

‘No, there isn't.'

I was about to repeat my insistence, but I had been in this situation before and decided to be discretionary rather than valorous. ‘Do you want beetroot?' She made a face which I took as a negative. ‘You're going to have to admit soon to my father that you don't like it. Judging from the amount he's been growing at the school, in his garden and on his allotment, I expect we'll soon be receiving at least ten a week to boil and pickle.'

Max thought that she was equal to this. ‘We'll just throw them out when he's gone.'

Such naivety. I felt slightly sad for her. Shaking my head slowly I explained, ‘He'll want to see what we've done with them. He'll be looking forward to tasting them. He'll keep on about them; the strain of lying will eventually prove too much and you'll find yourself crumbling.'

The implications made her pause, think, pause, then think again. Her expression told me that she had got the message. ‘Oh . . .'

‘Exactly,' I said grimly. At least I had transformed her mood from one of inexplicable irritability to one of entirely explicable gloom. I cast around for something to distract her and the only thing I could find was the news about the latest poor soul to find that living in Thornton Heath was not always good for the health. It worked, though, as was obvious from her widening eyes as my tale unfolded.

‘A compass?'

I nodded. ‘No pencil, though.'

The table laid, we were by now sitting down and eating, the jar of beetroot sitting between us untouched, an air of reproachful isolation seeping from it. I may have to say so myself but, all in all, it was a pretty decent salad, with or without roots of the beet variety. ‘And she shared a house with the dead PE teacher?'

‘She did.'

She snorted triumphantly, which is a pretty impressive feat, especially since she remained just as pretty whilst doing it. ‘I
told
you.'

‘Did you?' I own to a degree of nonplussedness at this assertion.

‘Yes. At the open evening. I said that all PE teachers are lesbians.'

I found something in the lettuce that didn't taste entirely lettuce-like, in that it was soft and slimy and possibly slugoid. I tried my best not to show any emotion. ‘Just because they shared a house doesn't mean they were . . . like that.'

She snorted again, this time giving it a veneer of incredulity; incredulity, I surmised, at my ingenuousness. She replied in a tone that one might use to a small boy who had just asked why girls didn't have willies. ‘Oh, come on, Lance. With a dungeon where the front bedroom should be?' was her not unreasonable enquiry. ‘And a nice cosy double bedroom at the back?'

She had a point, I conceded. ‘So you think they were killed because of their proclivities?' I asked.

‘Maybe.' She sounded as if she didn't think so.

‘Have you got another theory?'

‘They were both teachers.'

‘And?'

‘Marlene Jeffries, a PE teacher, was battered to death with some lifting weights, and Yvette Mangon, who taught maths, had a compass stuck in her eye. They've both been killed with things that they use in their jobs.'

Well, it was a theory, I had to admit. ‘We don't know that Yvette Mangon was killed with the compass,' I pointed out, rather hoping that she hadn't been. ‘In fact it's more likely that she was killed by the stab wounds.'

‘It's symbolic, Lance,' she insisted.

‘So who's the killer? Some deranged pupil? One who hated cross-country running and failed mathematics O-level?'

‘Possibly,' she said, somewhat defensively.

It was my turn to snort, although I did it quietly and a long, long way under my breath. ‘That would apply to ninety-seven per cent of people in the country.'

‘It doesn't mean that it couldn't be true.'

‘No,' I agreed, but only because I didn't want to upset her.

At that moment she did the female thing of completely contradicting herself; Dad once explained to me that it's evolved over the millennia to disorientate men and make them feel stupid and, my God, it works. ‘Or, of course, it could be someone who doesn't like lesbians.'

‘I've always known that maths teachers were weird, but not like that,' I said thoughtfully.

She agreed thoughtfully; the concept that Yvette Mangon might be archetypal of all maths teachers was mesmerizing. The idea that instead of going home of an evening with a worn leather briefcase to eat a tea of sardines on toast, then watch the nine o'clock news followed by the Open University, they routinely retired to an epicurean feast of swan stuffed with goose stuffed with duck, followed by a couple of hours with the anal beads and the stirrups filled my head to bursting. Indeed, I think it filled Max's. There was a look on her face that spoke of strange visions.

She suddenly stopped chewing, then made a face. ‘Did you wash this lettuce?'

TWENTY

T
he journey from Thornton Heath to Tooting Graveney can be made only by bus, bicycle or car for the Underground does not extend to the London Borough of Croydon, in which Thornton Heath sits like a resplendent jewel in a particularly impressive and ornate crown. Because my trusty BMW was sick with a disease it was beyond my capabilities to cure (it had refused to start), I was forced to choose between two self-powered wheels and a London omnibus; neither prospect was entirely of the pleasing variety, but that of cycling in the afternoon heat was infinitely worse. The upside of all this was that I had a grand view of the verdant pleasure that is Mitcham Common as I sat atop the number sixty-four bus (although that adjective was at the present time perhaps not entirely appropriate in view of the drought, since it temporarily resembled more the Arizona dustbowl than a tropical oasis). It was still, though, a welcome break in what even I have to admit can be the slightly claustrophobic environs of South London, in that one can see for more than twenty yards in any direction; I am certain it was my imagination but I even felt the first vague stirrings of agoraphobia as I sat there, feeling slightly sick from the jerky swaying, the heat of the day and the fumes of the bus's throbbing diesel engine. This was not helped by the presence of large numbers of loud, excitable and rumbustious schoolchildren, just out of lessons, who accompanied me. Once past Mitcham Common, one comes through the delightfully but somewhat oddly named Amen Corner (I know of no strong ties between that area and evangelicalism), thence on to Tooting; all the while one is on this journey (perhaps ‘pilgrimage'?), one is aware that one is heading for the central parts of London, and perhaps one is even afraid that one is nearing a heart of darkness.

In those days, Tooting was noticeably more cosmopolitan than Thornton Heath, although that may not be true in this age. It held an air of much greater mysticism, almost exoticism, and I always found myself excited by this. I knew that there were well-advanced plans for St George's Medical School – my alumnus – to relocate here from the somewhat more rarefied and refined landscape of Hyde Park Corner, and I looked forward to this with somewhat mixed feelings. The old St George's building, Lanesborough House, was a magnificent early eighteenth-century edifice, and I found student life in the centre of London to be an intoxicating experience (pun intended); from what I had seen of its replacement, it looked as though architects with all the soul of malfunctioning, right-angle-fixated automatons had been let loose. However, given the ethnic mix of Tooting, the medicine was likely to prove far more exciting (if not entirely baffling) to the medical students than it had been in Knightsbridge.

My goal that afternoon was not the Fountain Hospital, where construction work on the medical school was nearing completion, but a place I had always found rather pleasant, although my reason for going there was less so. I alighted from the bus, being jostled by huge numbers of shouting, cackling children, then turned to take my bearings. I was standing near the statue of Edward the Seventh, who was looking rather forlorn, covered as he was in verdigris and pigeon poo; it reminded me rather of the fate of Ozymandias, albeit with somewhat less dignity. A large flower stall was behind it, the blooms trying to suck whatever coolness they could out of the shade of the Tooting Broadway tube station canopy. People streamed in and out of this latter, looking severely hot and stressed, blending right in with the rest of us. Try as I might, I could not see much resemblance with the area's namesake in New York. I crossed the road when the green man said I could and began to make my way up the High Street towards Tooting Bec, which was (whisper it quietly lest ye be overheard) perhaps slightly posher.

It was not long before I turned up Selkirk Road on the left, then right into Fishponds Road. This is a long road and there is neither a fish or pond in sight. It also rises inexorably with a slight but, in that heat, killing gradient; by the time I reached its end to turn left again into Beechcroft Road, I was not so much exuding as pouring perspiration, and there was yet more ascent ahead of me, although the worst was now over. By the time I reached Glenburnie Road I was feeling none too good; at least, though, I was at journey's end.

Springfield Hospital was built in early Victorian times when they really knew how to build a loony bin, when no expense was spared to make sure that, just because you're one sandwich short of a picnic, it doesn't mean you shouldn't have a nice view. There were large immaculate grounds, an ornamental pond (perhaps
that
was where the fish were), some nicely tended formal gardens and, like poor relatives, quite a few barrack-like buildings It had everything a modern hospital needs and it exuded an air of calm tranquillity, which I am sure was wonderful for the more disturbed patients. What was perhaps slightly more troubling was that some of the outbuildings had obvious high-security measures such as chain-link fencing topped by barbed wire; I suspected that these were not there to keep people out . . . I knew also that there was somewhere in the main house (although I had never seen it) an operating theatre, a piece of information that made my flesh creep somewhat. It was bad enough that I remember witnessing as a medical student the application of electroconvulsive therapy here, a sight once seen never to be forgotten. Thus does medical science make its slow, ponderous progress, leaving in its wake crushed innocents, unremarked and rewarded only by death, who have lain down their lives and well-being in a fashion just as valorous as those who die or are wounded on the battlefield; those given radium for tuberculosis, or arsenic for warts, those bled within a pint of their lives because of fever, or those with dog bites who were treated by the topical application of aqua fortis (guaranteed to make your eyes water a bit).

So all in all, Springfield Hospital presented me with a curious, perturbing amalgam of memories and association.

Not least because of one of its present patients.

The district health authority could have made a pretty penny had it been opened to the public, even without the added entertainment value of the patients. The scents of the flowers as I walked up to the main entrance were almost intoxicating, given the heat and my dehydrated exhaustion; I wondered how they managed to keep the gardens so neat, weed-free and, above all, moist. The fountain tinkled merrily, adding to the sense of oasis in this driest of summers; the black-faced rhomboid clock at the top of the building said that it was three thirty but had said so when I had been there as a student, so I guessed it had stopped. Inside the impressively tall light brown doors, the picture of opulence was tarnished slightly by the interior furnishing in the entrance hall. It was difficult to put my finger on precisely why – it could have been the chairs of moulded orange plastic that were arranged around the walls, or perhaps the scuffed black-and-white flooring that had, over the years, become seriously pock-marked, but I think it was mainly the magnificent marble fire surround that had been boarded up with plywood on which were pinned an assortment of health posters. Not that the rickety looking reception desk in the corner helped, covered as it was in light blue Formica and a bored-looking girl of twenty years and twenty stones. Elton John and Kiki Dee pretended to love each other for perhaps the thousandth time in my hearing and the receptionist looked as convinced as I did. She barely looked at me as I approached and only reacted when I said, ‘My name's Dr Elliot.'