Nor All Your Tears (7 page)

‘No,' I said tiredly. It was Saturday and I had only just got up, had only just managed to make a cup of overly strong tea; somehow I had known that the telephone had been ringing at the behest of my progenitor and no one else; it seemed to reflect his character, to be exigent, unreasonable and taxing.

‘Do you know what they've done?'

I repeated the negative with a sigh. He might have been referring to the latest slightly bizarre choice of the England cricket-team selectors in their increasingly hysterical efforts to avoid a complete five-test whitewash by the touring West Indies. He might, just as easily, have been referring to the gas board, the water board or the pixies that he used to tell me lived at the bottom of the garden; I was, in truth, never sure whether that last was just a joke or whether he really believed in them himself.

‘I'm coming round,' he said by way of inadequate explanation. The phone went down before I could suggest that I might have something better to do.

Thirty minutes later and he was striding past my opened front door, launching straight into the topic of the day by asking again, ‘Do you know what they've done?'

Once upon a time I might have tried a dose of sarcasm on him – ‘I know it's amazing, Dad, but I'm half an hour older and I
still
don't know' – but I knew from bitter experience that it would be like wasting a thing of beauty on the sweet desert air. ‘Tell me.'

‘They've arrested George Cotterill.'

I did not follow. ‘George,' he repeated impatiently. It was one of the many fascinating things about my father that he said things that in his head were part of a connected thread of dialogue, but that to the outsider seemed completely dissociated with reality; as, indeed, they often were. It made talking to him an interesting intellectual exercise in Holmesian deduction. There followed a pause as I stared into space helplessly. ‘Who?' I asked eventually, at which he tutted and sighed with annoyance and explained as if to a particularly simple simpleton, ‘George, the caretaker at the school.'

‘Oh . . . Why?'

‘
I
don't know, do I? Ada told me this morning. She woke me.'

‘You mean she rang you?' I asked, before I could help myself.

He stared at me. ‘Of course,' he said and I could not tell whether he said this with outrage or sadness, or possibly a mix of the two. He explained, ‘She lives opposite him in Kingswood Avenue and saw it all. Masson and two others in plain clothes, plus a car full of uniformed bobbies. She said it was as though they were arresting one of the Great Train Robbers, not a sixty-seven-year-old man.'

‘But presumably they think he's a sixty-seven-year-old man who might have murdered someone, Dad. That would make him potentially quite dangerous.'

‘Pshaw!' he said. Or at least I think that was what he said. It had a single syllable and involved both his lips and the back of his throat, but was basically an unspellable sound. ‘George had nothing to do with it.'

I wasn't about to argue; great experience told me that along with trying to lick your own eyebrows and learning to love Stockhausen, it was an impossible task. ‘In that case, I'm sure they'll release him fairly soon.'

This time the sound was different but equally beyond my powers of literacy; it approximated to, ‘Kkeukk!' and came from a heavily camouflaged face that, I imagined, radiated disgust beneath the beard. ‘With Masson in charge, anything could happen. Look at the mess-up he made of the Lightoller case.'

Well, I suppose I have to admit that the good Inspector Masson had not covered himself in glory on that one, but then no one had really. It had only been good fortune that had allowed Max and me to discover the truth. ‘He's not a bad copper, Dad. We all make mistakes.'

His eyebrows were hoisted up his frowning forehead like two over-hairy greying caterpillars on puppet strings as he stared at me. He said nothing but his entire demeanour suggested that for the life of him he couldn't recall the details of any mistakes that he had personally made. After a pause and an all but inaudible grunt he took a sip of tea and recoiled at once, as if it had bitten him. ‘My God, Lance. What is this?'

‘Tea.'

He stood up from his chair at the kitchen table, strode over the sink and poured it in, then peered at the liquid as it drained away. ‘Well,' he said thoughtfully, ‘it doesn't seem to dissolve metal, so it can't be
too
acidic.'

‘Dad . . .'

‘No, Lance. This has to be said. I appreciate that you have the domestic habits of a warthog, that you can't cook, can't keep the pit you inhabit in any state approaching tidiness and that you dress like the last, blind customer at a jumble sale, but you really must draw the line at the poisoning of innocent parties. In future I shall be bringing all my own food and drink into this abode; I may even resort to bringing my own crockery and cutlery if the standard of washing up doesn't improve.'

‘Now, really . . .'

He held up his hand; it was a gesture I remember from my earliest days. It meant ‘be quiet' and when I was in short trousers I learned that it was not to be disobeyed; this Pavlovian learning reflex remained unshaken even now. In my silence, he said, ‘What I want to know is what you're going to do about this.'

‘Do? Do about what?'

‘About poor George's arrest.'

Only years of training enabled me to keep both breathing and talking at this point; someone less used to the idiosyncratic unreasonableness of my papa would have been rendered all but comatose by the implications of this question. ‘What am I supposed to do?'

‘Masson's your friend. Find out what's going on.'

Which was such a ludicrous description of the relationship between the Inspector and me – akin to asserting that Hitler and Churchill were pen pals who cooked up the Second World War for a lark – that, used as I was to his incorrigible habit of voicing outrageous assertions, I reacted badly. ‘You what?' I squeaked.

‘You seem to get on. I've noticed it.' He looked up at the polystyrene tiles on the ceiling, two of which were coming away. ‘Oh, I know he makes out he's angry with you all the time, but take my word for it, he's got great respect for you, both as a doctor and as an amateur detective.'

‘He keeps all this deep inside, then.'

He stood up. ‘That's your problem, Lance. You just see what's on the surface. I would have thought you'd have learned by now that a good doctor looks past the superficial; it's inside people that you find reality.' I wondered what I'd find if I looked inside him; somebody sane, perhaps? I sincerely doubted it. He continued on his way out of the kitchen, ‘Anyway, see what you can do, will you? Tell him that I can vouch as a character witness for George. If that man's a murderer, then I'm a madman.'

I said nothing; I didn't even smile.

On his way down the garden, he turned and said, ‘And for goodness' sake have some mercy on these shrubs and give them some water. It looks like the Kalahari out here.'

As it happened, I didn't need to talk to Masson. Having washed and dressed, I then phoned Max to see how she was. She had taken the day before off from work and had spent most of it bursting into tears; Sergeant Abelson had taken Twinkle away, presumably for a post-mortem (I had wondered if there was such a thing as forensic veterinary pathology, but hadn't liked to ask), and I had cleaned up as best I could in the morning before surgery; removing all the physical evidence didn't help erase her memories, though. In the evening, I had taken her out for a curry, but even a lamb vindaloo and mushroom bhaji hadn't cheered her up; she had insisted on going back home and refused the offer of company.

Her voice sounded a little brighter now though, which gave me some cause for hope; she was just about to leave to spend the day at her parents' in Hampstead and we agreed to meet at the Norbury Hotel at seven that evening for a drink. I had thought about visiting a pet shop and perhaps buying her a baby rabbit, but decided against it, suspecting that it was too soon after the tragedy; accordingly it looked as if it was going to be a day spent with Frank Bough and
Grandstand
, alternating (when the racing was on) with thinking about watering the garden; the hosepipe ban meant that to achieve this was going to require a lot of watering-can action and the prospect did not appeal as the heat of the last few weeks had not lessened in the slightest.

‘Maybe I
want
to live in the Kalahari,' I murmured.

The doorbell sounded and when I opened the door I found the culprit to be Sergeant Abelson. She had a nervous smile on her face. ‘Sorry to bother you, Dr Elliot.'

I ushered her in. ‘You're not bothering me,' I said politely. ‘What can I do for you?' I asked as I showed her into the front room and hastily cleared a space on the sofa so that she could sit on the loose cover rather than several days' worth of newspapers, a simultaneously impressive and impressively untidy back catalogue of the
British Medical Journal
and a pair of dirty socks. She smiled as I was doing this but didn't comment. Having seated herself, she explained, ‘I thought you'd like to know what I've found out about Tristan Charlton.'

‘Of course I do,' I said. ‘Can I get you something to drink, perhaps? Tea, coffee, a cold drink?'

‘Orange squash would be nice.'

I returned in about five minutes to find her examining a photograph of Max that I had in a frame on a low table by the sofa. Max was photogenic and this one, taken on her birthday a couple of months before, had found her especially so; her eyes (always large and luminous) seemed to glow, even shine, and her slightly lopsided mouth always became somehow perfectly asymmetrical as she laughed delightedly. The Sergeant put it back down and said to me with a smile, ‘She's very pretty.'

It gave me a strange sort of shivery feeling of pleasure as I said, ‘I think so.' I handed her the squash. ‘Sorry, run out of ice.'

‘It'll be fine.' She put it down next to the photograph without sampling it then, as I sat down opposite her, said, ‘Tristan Charlton has been an in-patient at Springfield Hospital, Tooting, since April. He was a voluntary patient and has been treated for paranoid schizophrenia.'

‘And he's still there?'

‘Yes.'

‘Can he come and go at will?'

She nodded. ‘He's not regarded as dangerous either to himself or anyone else.'

I barked a bitter laugh as my opinion of psychiatrists was confirmed; they would have diagnosed Ted Bundy as merely neurotic. ‘Really? They haven't sought my views on the subject, I notice. Nor those of Sophie: nor indeed Twinkle.'

She made a face of sympathy. ‘I appreciate what you say, but the reality is that he has paid his dues for what he did to you; in fact officially he's kept out of trouble since he was released from prison last year. To all intents and purposes, he's done the right thing by seeking psychiatric help.'

‘Does he have an alibi for Thursday night?'

‘No, but that's hardly surprising. The voluntary patients are free to come and go between ten in the morning and ten at night.'

‘Have you spoken to him?'

‘No.'

‘Are you going to?'

She hesitated. ‘When I get the chance to. We're rather busy at the moment, what with the school killing.'

And I saw at once that fate, for once, had been my friend and given me an opportunity to keep my father happy without having to beard Inspector Masson in all his terrifying glory. ‘How is that going?' I asked in a cunningly disinterested way.

‘Well, I shouldn't really say.'

‘No, of course,' I hastened to say. ‘It was wrong of me to ask, Sergeant.'

She hesitated, then said with a faint, modest smile, ‘My name's Jean.'

I was slightly taken aback and it was after a short hesitation that I allowed, ‘Jean it is, then.'

I had assumed that that was that, but she continued in a low voice, perhaps fearful that Masson really did have the supernatural abilities he seemed to threaten, ‘We made an arrest this morning.'

‘Really?' I think I did quite well with the feigned surprise.

‘The caretaker.'

‘George Cotterill? You think he did it?'

She nodded. ‘His story concerning his movements contains certain inconsistencies. There is at least sixty minutes unaccounted for between the time he claims to have locked up and left the school and the time he arrived home.'

‘Is that all?' It didn't sound much.

‘And he has a record.'

‘Oh? What did he do?'

Her smile was that of someone with a very, very big secret. ‘Something bad. Something very bad indeed.'

THIRTEEN

T
he weather had been having its effects on my patients and, in turn, this was having its effects on me. With increasing numbers of cases of heatstroke, especially amongst the elderly and those under two, surgeries were always busy and we were making huge numbers of house calls; something that in itself was becoming a problem. Every day now, by about one in the afternoon, the tarmac of the roads and pavements felt soft as I walked on it; I felt completely drained of energy and my skin greasy and dirty. As I passed women in light summer dresses, men in T-shirts and children in swimming costumes, I (in my suit because I am a doctor) felt even hotter than I actually was. And everyone, it seemed, was upending fizzy drinks bottles, licking mountainous ice-cream cones or, if they were children, slurping Jubbly-Wubblys,
the melted bright-red ice water running down their chins and over their hands; I had to make a conscious effort not to stare in naked envy.

The fact that I had arranged to meet Max in the Norbury Hotel for a drink kept me going that afternoon through five house-calls, three of them heat-related. I wasn't finished until half-four, and then I had an evening clinic which was completely booked and didn't finish until six-fifty, giving me no chance at all to shower or change before it was time to meet Max. I could only hope that I wasn't exuding too many unpleasant odours. I reckoned, though, that my news about George Cotterill would drive all olfactory unpleasantness from her mind.