Nor All Your Tears (15 page)

‘Of course she bloody was!' I had tried not to lose my temper, honest.

He considered. ‘But she's still alive, isn't she?' he asked slyly.

He was referring obliquely to his sister, of course, and I was thinking that I had to remain calm, and only by doing that could I remain in command of the situation. ‘It was unnecessarily cruel, Tristan.'

He made play of considering this, tilting his head, distorting his lips, frowning in what was supposed to convey considered contemplation, every inch of him portraying a man who was intellectual and refined and, above all, sane. His answer, though, gave the lie to that. ‘I have yet to be convinced by anything that has happened to me, or anything anyone has said to me, that there is any such thing as
unnecessary
cruelty.'

‘For God's sake, Tristan.'

‘In fact, I would tend to adopt the opposing rhetorical position; I think that, given the indifferent, Godless universe in which we have crawled from the primordial ooze, given the fact that there are no moral absolutes other than the compulsion to survive – a compulsion that is mine yet for which I cannot be made responsible (and therefore, by the simplest of logical deductions, I cannot be made responsible for its consequences) – I would say that cruelty is a necessity. I must survive and therefore must adopt whichever strategies are most likely to achieve that end.'

His voice was thoughtful, as if he were reading from his doctoral thesis – ‘An Explanation of Sociopathy' – and he didn't once look directly at me, although it was clear that every word was aimed at me, and my loved ones, and the wrongs he imagined had been perpetrated by me. The gentleman of the mathematical bent suddenly uttered a word of eye-watering profanity; it was beyond the abilities of my imagination to conjure up the images of group-therapy sessions in which he and Tristan participated.

Suddenly, Tristan yawned; it was an impressive thing, something so deep and so long, that paused at its peak for so long, that I wondered if he was suddenly going to plunge into unconsciousness at the end of it, but he didn't. In a quiet voice he said, ‘Fucking pills. Screw your head right up, you know, Lancey.'

What was I supposed to say that? I didn't have to fret too long, though, for he went on, ‘Anyway, I bet she didn't cry too long. Bet you went right out and brought her another bunny, and she dried her eyes and was a happy little girly again.'

I had thought about doing just that, but hadn't got around to it; it was characteristic of Tristan that he should be so unerring in his assessments. ‘Max is a vet, Tristan,' I admonished him. ‘She's not like that.'

No reaction. From his position on the bed, his eyes looking straight up, his sole response was to say, ‘If you say so.'

There was some commotion from the day room; someone began screaming and this brought with it sounds of someone – actually two people, I think – trying to comfort whoever it was. Tristan didn't react other than to comment, ‘Happens all the time with that one. He thinks General Zod is after him for medical experiments. Fuck knows why he thinks that; probably quite fancies the idea of a good anal probing.'

The noise eventually abated but only temporarily for then a bell rang, which started the kerfuffle anew. Still Tristan didn't react, other than in speech. ‘Time for you to go, Lancey, That's the end of visiting and I have an appointment.'

It was five but it appeared I was the only visitor. I thought about exercising my prerogative as a doctor and staying for a while longer – it didn't look as if anyone cared anyway – but couldn't see the point. I had never been sure what I had been expecting to achieve in coming and certainly hadn't thought to convince Tristan to leave me and my loved ones alone. I supposed it had been just to reassure myself that he really was seeking help and, perhaps also, to see my bogey man again, to fix him once more in my mind.

I got up, not bidding him any sort of farewell, although he did call after me languidly, ‘Ta ta, Lancey. Thanks for coming.'

The journey home was no less hot and uncomfortable than its predecessor. In fact, it was considerably more unpleasant because, just as the bus sailed past Mitcham Common Golf Club, I realized what I had potentially done. Perhaps I had been wrong in assuming that Tristan had nailed Twinkle in mock crucifixion to Max's front door; in which case I had told him her first name and her profession. Not much for sure but, in Tristan's hands, quite probably enough.

TWENTY-ONE

P
athologists and general practitioners don't get to meet very much, except if they're married to one another, and not many are. Actually, pathologists and any normal kinds of doctors don't get to meet much either, which partly explains why most doctors think pathologists are odd; the other reason why your average doctor thinks they're odd is because they're pathologists, and they do what they do, which is exactly what any normal person would not want to do. Simple, really.

Mark had been one of my closest friends at medical school and had originally shown no signs that he was anything other than a normal medical student; he worked extremely hard (albeit for three weeks every year just before the exams), drank extremely hard and didn't give a proverbial. (I know that this is a stereotypical image of medical students, but it's stereotypical for a very good reason.) We were wild but, I hope, good-hearted and harmless. We feared no one, except possibly dental students (the dental students scared us, because they did what medical students do, only did it with even more depravity), and we felt good about ourselves because we were learning how to treat diseases and save lives, and all that sort of tommyrot which these days is widespread.

Anyway at the time, as far as the rest of us knew, Mark was going to turn into a proper doctor; instead he became the curious hybrid that is the pathologist – interacting not with patients but with body fluids or corpses, in fact usually so disordered of personality that they do not want to meet living patients. They spend their lives sequestered in laboratories, seeing the grist of the medical mill only when it is too late to be of immediate practical benefit to anyone.

I apologize. I rant. It comes of a bad experience as a fourth-year medical student when the professor of histopathology made me slice a fixed brain as if I was preparing cuts of steak, and then humiliated me in front of my peers because it looked, as he so cruelly said, as if it had been done by ‘a luetic gorilla with the shaking palsy'.

Mark had, however, seemed to remain a surprisingly decent chap, although the only contact I had had with him was at the medical school reunions where he had behaved perfectly normally; certainly he had drunk prodigiously so, to all intents and purposes, he had appeared not at all brain-damaged. Until I had met him over the rather badly used body of Marlene Jeffries, I had assumed that he was still in Sheffield, investigating cases in which death was due to poisoned Bakewell tart or suffocation by Eccles cake. I was delighted that he was now in my vicinity, even more pleased when I bumped into him again in the car park of Mayday Hospital, which is the local Croydon infirmary, and not nearly as bad as people insisted. I had just been paying a courtesy call on Sylvie, one of my oldest patients, who was unfortunately celebrating her one hundred and second birthday (statistically, she had just reached the age at which she was more likely to wake up dead than alive) in the hospital because she had overdone the Tio Pepe and fallen over, thereby breaking her humerus).

‘Hello, Lance,' he called across to me.

He was a tall man, surprisingly self-confident for a pathologist, with pale eyes and ash-blond hair. We approached each other just as a number 109 bus rumbled past on its way to Croydon, each of us pleased. He said, ‘Sorry we haven't had a chance to catch up, Lance,' he said as we vigorously shook hands. ‘A murder scene isn't exactly the ideal place for backslapping reunions.'

‘How are you?' I asked.

‘Well, thank you. And you?'

I assured him I was. ‘Is this where you're based now? I thought you were in Yorkshire.'

He winked, then rubbed the first two fingers and thumb of his right hand together. ‘More spondulicks in the metropolis, Lance. A
lot
of coroner's work.' Which summed up pathologists as far as I was concerned; not interested in anything except corpses and cash. He continued, ‘But I'm not based
here
.'

Now, I have a lot of time for Mark, but that last comment rather wounded me. He made it dismissively, and did so whilst looking back at the fine part-Victorian, part-ramshackle conglomeration that was Croydon's finest (albeit only) acute hospital. Before I could defend the reputation of this wonderful, not to say unique, sanatorium, he added, ‘I have NHS sessions at King's.'

‘Nice,' I remarked.

‘The folk of South Yorkshire are fine people, but you can only take so much coal-miner's lung.' He spoke in a jovial manner.

‘So what do people die of around here?'

He grinned. ‘Murder, apparently.'

Once again, I felt the reputation of my homeland had been impugned. ‘It's not always like that.'

‘No? Inspector Masson told me that this place was some sort of murder magnet, and you were the centre of it. He was of the opinion that people coming into contact with you were more likely to die than to get better.'

I suspected that this was technically slander, but made a rapid once-and-for-all decision not to pursue Masson through every court in the land about it. Changing the subject I enquired, ‘I do hope Yvette Mangon was dead when the drawing compass went in her eye.'

A normal human being would have winced at this, but Mark did autopsies for a living. ‘I think so. She had seventy-seven incisions, all told, and some of them were very deep. The photographs showed a huge amount of blood at the scene – as you'll be aware – and several of the neck wounds severed major blood vessels.'

There was a certain degree of cheeriness about his demeanour that mere words cannot render. The more blood the better seemed to be the Bentham family motto. ‘Yes, I remember,' I said weakly.

‘Quite frenzied,' he said with relish.

‘Quite.'

‘I think I'm going to enjoy working around here.'

It did appear at that moment that a man whose spiritual home was an abattoir might well see Thornton Heath as a desirable place to pursue his career choice. We parted, he presumably to his blood-spattered dungeon, me to my brightly lit, clean surgery and I own to being in a thoughtful mood as I did so. That the two murders were linked seemed impossible to deny, the nature of that connection was obscure to me, hidden as it was amidst a bewildering number of possibilities. Was this the work of someone who hated teachers, as the facts that Marlene Jeffries had been killed with the tools of her profession and Yvette Mangon had been stabbed in the eye with a compass suggested? Was it perhaps connected with that most peculiar of front bedrooms? Perhaps it was someone who, like Max, was convinced that all female PE teachers were (how can I put this tactfully?) of a different persuasion, and didn't like it?

There were deep, muddy, but fatally swirling waters here.

TWENTY-TWO

I
was not looking forward to that night because I was on call. Merging practices had meant that the on-call rota was now considerably better, in that I was only on call once in every seven days; it was therefore also, of course, now considerably worse when it did come round, because that one night in a week was one hell of a humdinger. Not only did we not get to sleep, we barely got to sit down; these days, after a night's on-call we had to take a day off, whereas before we would have made do with a half-day. There was, of course, variety. We got to see all ages, all sexes, all predicaments, all moods and all reactions. We saw the trivial and the serious, we saw the extreme and the exasperating, the hilarious and the appalling; unfortunately, by the time it got to four in the morning with barely time for a fluid break (either in or out), I didn't care. By that time, I could have been called to the scene of a bug-eyed, two-headed, slime monster from Venus giving birth and I wouldn't have been capable of reacting in any way other than as I had been taught by experience and learning to do; this was fine, as long as my subconscious was fully functioning but, as every pilot knows, once the autopilot goes tits up, you very quickly find yourself in unpleasantly odiferous waters without a means of propulsion.

On that night it went pretty much as expected – the highlight being the drunken man with a ferret bite and a tear in his trousers – until I was called to attend to Albert Stewart, a forty-two-year-old man who had collapsed. I thought nothing of it – was incapable by then of thinking anything of anything, as it was three in the morning – and duly attended the drab upper-floor maisonette not far from the junction of Keston Road with Thornton Road. It was starting to drizzle but, despite the heat, it was still so hot that this gift of moisture was almost a joke, as if it were merely the gods applying a bit more sweat to my brow. I was shown in by the woman who lived on the ground floor and who, it transpired, was the landlady. She was a short woman, broad about the beam and, it must be said, slightly shabby; I tried to make allowances, given the hour and given the fact that I probably looked as if my suit was a charity shop reject, but I think there was little excuse for the smell of urine that seemed to envelope her. I say ‘envelope her', but what I mean was the stench hit me with eye-watering intensity as soon as she opened the door. Her quilted pink dressing gown of the finest pseudo-silk had seen better days, largely in the way that a corpse has.

‘I'm looking for Mr Stewart,' I said. ‘I'm the on-call doctor.'

She bore a look of wide-eyed excitement. ‘He's upstairs. I found him.' She spoke triumphantly, as if she had won a treasure hunt. ‘I heard a crash and I went out to see what was going on, and I called up the stairs but he didn't answer . . .'