Nor All Your Tears (22 page)

Jack, who despite being a very acute and caring clinician inhabited the same world as Kenneth Williams, snorted into his powdered Maxwell House, earning himself a look of reproof from our nurse come carer. A police siren sailed past the opened sash window as Jack said, ‘I bumped into your pathologist friend yesterday at the hospital – Mark Bentham.'

‘Did you? I'm not surprised, he's having to spend a lot of time around here at present.'

‘He was quite chatty. He was telling me about your reputation amongst the police.'

‘What reputation?'

Jack winked at Brian. ‘The “Elliot curse”. “All those who enter here beware, for this is the land of the Elliots, and you may well not survive”.' He was within an inch of splitting his sides, so hilarious did he consider this.

‘Ha-bloody-ha.'

A phone began to ring downstairs, probably in the receptionists' area. It rang three times before it was picked up. Jack said, ‘He asked me to tell you that Jeremy Gillman was drowned, although he had been half strangled first.'

Brian winced. I had often noticed a touch of squeamishness in Brian, which struck me as odd in a man who claimed to have had a promising career in ophthalmic surgery before it had been foreshortened by tuberculosis, now thankfully vanquished. The intercom sounded. Jane, because she was nearest and not because it was her job as a woman, answered it. ‘Yes?'

Our intercom system was not of the highest quality; it was made of the type of plastic that I remember my Christmas-stocking toys being made of, and the various components had suffered a variety of intermittent assaults over the years, so that often the buttons refused to work and the sound quality suggested that you were talking to someone with tentacles for vocal cords that lived on the far side of Neptune. However, we were used to its foibles and we were able to penetrate the distorted, unceasing white noise to discern that Sheila was talking and that the London Road surgery was on the phone. Brian rose from his comfy chair to go downstairs to take the call. We had been expecting a call since one of their four doctors had been on call last night and this would be to update us on any of our patients with significant problems.

Brian returned a few moments later.

‘Well?' demanded Jack. ‘Anything we should know about?'

‘Mrs Wilson died.' Ethel Wilson had been close to succumbing to her womb cancer for close to six months now, so that this came as no surprise, although no less sad for that. ‘A case of appendicitis in Queenswood Avenue, and an overdose in Ross Road.'

‘Was it successful?' I asked, not out of prurience but because it had practical implications.

He shook his head as he reached across to snaffle another biscuit from the tin. ‘He swallowed half a bottle of paracetamol some time in the night. His wife found him first thing this morning. He's in Mayday now. He's apparently in a bad way.'

‘Who was it?'

‘Arthur Silsby.' He paused, a Rich Tea held halfway to his mouth, and I could sense that it was in an agony of indecision about its fate. ‘I wouldn't have thought he was the type to do something like that.'

Sergeant Abelson lived in a pleasant semi-detached, pre-war house in Croham Road, not far from South Croydon Station. It took her a moment to respond to the doorbell and when she did, she looked flustered. ‘Come in,' she said, and immediately turned away. I did as I was bade and was immediately assailed in the olfactory sense, by something unexpected; the smell of a baby. I had come to know this particular perfume well since, although having no children of my own, I had attended at (indeed, assisted at) the entry of numerous small citizens into this vale of tears; I had also done a six-month paediatric attachment at Queen Mary's Carshalton, probably the most heart-rending and depressing half-year of my life. I made my way through the dark hallway past a bicycle propped up against a radiator, into the small kitchen whither she had gone. She was at an ancient electric stove prodding with large wooden tongs at the contents of a huge cast-iron stewing pan, one with two handles. She was dressed in black slacks with the then-fashionable but surely totally impractical bell-bottoms; her T-shirt was a bright and multi-coloured tie-dyed thing.

I stood just inside the door as I said, ‘I'm sorry to bother you at home, Sergeant.' I had tried to contact her throughout the day to discuss what Max had told me about Tristan, but without success until she had rung back only an hour before to suggest I come to here to talk about it.

She stopped her prodding and looked at me with a welcoming smile. ‘Don't be daft. Police officers are always on duty. I learned that the first day out of training college.' Another prod, this one slightly more violent. ‘And, please, call me Jean.'

I bowed and nodded once my acquiescence. ‘You look busy.'

‘Oh. I'm not too bad. I'm alone in the house for once, which has given me a breathing space to do this.' She indicated the pan. I realized then that this was not her supper but a nappy wash. To realize that not only was she not single, but that she had a child as well, left me with a feeling that I couldn't analyse properly. She was an attractive woman, with a charming personality and, patently, a good intelligence; of course she had a husband and a baby. She wore no wedding band on her thin fingers, but that was quite probably for professional reasons; anyway, it was entirely possible that she wasn't formally married. Although at that time such an arrangement was still novel and yet to become almost the norm, we were passing out of a post-war society that automatically condemned such an arrangement (except when it had been done discreetly by the upper classes). ‘Coffee?'

‘Please.'

‘Milk? Sugar?'

‘Just milk.'

She made me sit in the back room on a tatty blue sofa whence I could see through French windows that the garden was long and thin and parched; it was untended and bore in its basic wildness and air of abandonment an astonishing resemblance to mine. With me in the room were a wooden high chair and a variety of baby-type toys. On a folded-away dining table was a wicker washing basket in which there was a tottering pile of unironed but clean Terylene nappies; next to it was a collapsed ironing board that leaned against the wall. She brought in two mugs of instant coffee and set one down on the dining table next to me; the other she held in her hands as she sat in the only other comfy chair in the room; it was upholstered in red velour material and was clearly genetically unrelated to the sofa. ‘Sorry about the mess. These murders are playing havoc with my domestic schedule and I've barely got time to do the essentials, let alone things like tidying.'

‘How old is your baby?'

‘He'll be eight months tomorrow.'

‘Where is he now?'

There was a clock on the wall that proclaimed more or less truthfully that it was seven-twenty. She glanced at it and then said, ‘With his father. I managed to persuade him to pick him up from my mother's and look after him for a while.'

The pause that followed was awkward and I own that it was my fault. I didn't want to appear nosy, but her answer – as well as her manner of answering – suggested that matters were not as I had at first thought. She looked at me with a neutral expression, perhaps waiting. When I didn't say anything, she resuscitated the conversation by explaining, ‘I thought his father was serious about the relationship but, as is often the way in my ethnic group, he has other imperatives. Afro-Caribbean men tend to have a more relaxed attitude to commitment.'

‘Oh . . .' I thought about this and fought to overcome my discomfort at such candidness. ‘So, you're bringing him up on his own? That must be hard, especially doing the job you're doing.'

‘It's harder being black and doing the job I'm doing,' she said flatly.

‘Yes,' I hastened to agree. ‘I'm sure it must be . . .'

She took a sip of coffee. ‘My mother does most of the care for me; she's only too happy to, thank God. Otherwise, it's friends and neighbours and anyone who's stupid enough to volunteer.'

This whole conversation made me acutely aware that the last thing she needed was someone bringing work into her home life. ‘I shouldn't have bothered you, Sergeant. I'm sorry—'

‘Jean, remember?' she interrupted. ‘And yes, you should have bothered me. I'm only sorry that I haven't been able to do more about your problem; it's not that I don't want to, it's just that the heat is really on us at the moment. The Inspector is under a great deal of pressure to stop the killings.'

‘Has he made any progress?'

She smiled sadly. ‘He thinks he has.'

‘But you disagree?'

‘Who cares what I think? I'm the token ethnic officer, only here so that the service looks good in the eyes of the black community.'

‘Whoa,' I protested. ‘I'm on your side.'

She looked at me over her coffee mug; her hands were clasped around it and I appreciated how long her fingers were. ‘Are you?' she enquired. It wasn't a particularly suspicious tone she used, more of a wary one, if you see what I mean.

‘Why wouldn't I be?'

She gestured with her head around her. ‘Because all this has come as a surprise to you, I think.'

‘Yes, I suppose it has,' I admitted.

‘An unmarried black mother. I bet there are all sorts of things going through your head now, all sorts of assumptions being rewritten.'

‘You're being unfair.' A defiant, slightly dismissive shrug met this; this said that it didn't matter to her what I was thinking. I wanted to tell her that I was telling the truth, that my parents, and later my father alone, had instilled into me the overriding importance of never judging without knowing as many of the data as were accessible. I wanted to, but I suspected that – as is true so often in life and as is so hard to enact – less was better. ‘What does the Inspector think is going on, then?'

‘He latched on to your sighting of Albert Stewart arguing with Gillman. We did a bit of digging and discovered that Albert Stewart is a very troubled individual. Two tours of Ulster have left him pretty mixed up. He served with some distinction in the Parachute Regiment as a sergeant, but then there was an incident in which a Roman Catholic civilian was shot and killed; a court of enquiry found him responsible as the patrol leader, although he didn't fire the shot. He was given a dishonourable discharge.'

‘A bit harsh.'

‘Someone always has to carry the can. Presumably there were no blacks to blame.' I didn't say anything, which was probably the best thing I could have done, for she apologized almost immediately. ‘I'm sorry. That was unfair of me.'

Manfully and diplomatically continuing my silence on her feelings of prejudice, I asked, ‘Why would he go about slaughtering the teaching staff of Bensham Manor?'

‘He was born in Talbot Road, not far from Crystal Palace football stadium; from nineteen fifty-seven until nineteen sixty-two he was a pupil at the school. He was a wild boy, too. They had a lot of trouble with him; in fact the police had a lot of trouble with him. He was in juvenile court seven times for vandalism and antisocial behaviour. I understand the magistrates eventually gave him the ultimatum of joining the army or going to borstal.'

Although I hadn't known the details, she wasn't surprising me. ‘Has Stewart been arrested?'

She nodded. ‘We're sweating him, but he hasn't said anything yet. Certainly, he hasn't confessed.' It was with something of a lost smile that she added, ‘Stewart's seen and done a lot in his life; I don't think there's going to be much that we can do to scare him, anyway.'

‘Do I get the impression you're not altogether convinced of his guilt?'

She snorted softly and drained her coffee. ‘I've been doing this job just long enough not to be surprised and not to be disappointed.'

‘You do know what's happened to Arthur Silsby?' I asked.

‘No,' she said, her voice low and questioning, as if she were about to hear something she wouldn't like, but it was with increasing interest that she listened to my account of his suicide attempt. ‘He's all right, though?' she asked. ‘He'll pull through?'

I could not be totally reassuring. ‘If you want to take pills as a cry for help, paracetamol isn't the drug of choice. It produces immediate effects that, depending on dose, may or may not kill you, depending on the quality of emergency care you get; if you recover, within a short while, you'll be all hunky-dory again, happy as Lawrence because you got some attention and maybe feeling slightly silly. Trouble is, paracetamol has rather longer-term effects on your liver, which tend to kick in after another few days or so; unless you're treated in time, the liver cells literally die in large numbers.'

‘Has he been treated in time?'

I had talked that day with the consultant looking after him; in his opinion, it was still in the balance. ‘Too early to say,' I said.

She put her coffee mug down on the carpet next to her, frowning, and asked herself, ‘What does this mean? Is it connected? If so, how?'

The doorbell sounded, breaking her out of her consternation. She got up and went to answer it, closing the door to the room so that I couldn't hear what was going on. There was a wait of some minutes during which I occupied the time by leaning back with my eyes closed. Something was nagging at me.

She came back in with a bundle of blankets in her arms. ‘Sorry to leave you so long. That was Michael's father bringing him back.'

‘May I see?'

She came over and crouched down beside me. Michael was asleep; Michael was beautiful, and I have a tendency to look on babies and children as nothing but a source of trouble and pain, especially for doctors. I said as much. ‘Thank you.' She looked at him, then whispered, ‘I think so.'

Even I could tell that it was time for my departure. ‘I'd better go.'