Nor All Your Tears (8 page)

I was not wrong.

‘Oh, my God!' She was shocked in a way that only she could be; Max was in many ways an innocent, in many others the most knowing person I have ever met. I suspect that she enjoyed – perhaps even revelled in – shock, excitement and incredulity. She delighted in her constant surprise at the variance between the world as she thought it should be and the world as it was, obstinately refusing to behave. ‘Really?'

I nodded glumly. ‘Apparently so. A young couple.'

‘He battered them to death?'

‘With a hammer.'

She winced. ‘Why?'

‘Apparently he saw himself as some sort of moral guardian. He had a strict Christian upbringing mixed with a healthy dose of schizoid paranoia; they lived in the same block of flats as him and weren't married. He was constantly remonstrating with them – the usual stuff about saving their souls, turning to God, and suchlike. They laughed at him, apparently; laughed once too often, though. He went completely bonkers, ranting about how he was going to save their souls, no matter what they did. He was convicted of their manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility and sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment.'

‘He should have been put in a secure mental hospital, surely . . .'

I shrugged. ‘At least fifty per cent of the prison population should be in mental hospitals. There just isn't the room for them.'

‘How long ago was all this?'

‘Twenty-three years ago.'

‘Where's he been since then?'

We were enjoying the faded, not to say sepulchral ambience of the lounge bar of the Norbury Hotel; as usual it was only sparsely patronized but the amount of cigarette, pipe and cigar smoke in the atmosphere was enough suggest there was a large conflagration in a not too distant location; there was a definite resemblance to Victorian London as I looked around while sipping a pint of Watney's Red Barrel bitter, and I half expected Jack the Ripper to jump out from one of the alcoves, perhaps waving a human pancreas, spattering the cream and gold flock wallpaper with gobbets of clotting blood. ‘No one knows,' I said. Max was sipping Dubonnet and lemonade, a drink I found curiously repellent and sweet, not at all helped by the Day-Glo pink that seemed, in that ghastly smoke-filled atmosphere, to shine with unearthly power. She liked it, though.

‘It's Dad's reaction that's worrying me.'

‘He'll be upset, you mean?'

‘Upset? He'll go ballistic. I can see him now, ranting and raving about the incompetence of Masson and the local plod in general. His opinion of the Inspector hasn't been particularly high, given Masson's predilection for arresting him at every available opportunity, so this is just going to be pouring petrol on the bonfire.'

‘But they do seem to have reasonable cause for at least suspecting him.'

I drained my pint; there was always something about Watney's Red that seemed acidic; it left a peculiar fuzzy feel to my teeth as if, like rhubarb, it was dissolving them. ‘That won't matter,' I assured her. ‘Dad spent forty years practising medicine as an art, not a science. He worked by premonition and he thought he had a consummate talent, no matter what the laboratory findings told him. He applies the same principles to life; if he thinks George is innocent, no amount of evidence to the contrary is going to persuade him otherwise. George could have been found covered from head to foot in human blood, and with entrails draped over his shoulders whilst gibbering about his lust for pagan murder, and my good pater would suspect a frame-up. You mark my words.'

I got up from the table and made ready to trudge through the Stygian atmosphere to the bar for refills, trying to keep at bay the nagging fear that, given the gloom, I would not be able to find Max on my return journey.

It was as I predicted, except that maybe Dad's reaction was even more violent than I expected.

‘That man is a disgrace to his uniform,' he declared.

‘He doesn't wear a uniform, Dad . . .'

‘Don't be an imbecile, Lance. You know exactly what I mean. For God's sake, I don't expect members of Her Majesty's Constabulary to be endowed with the intellectual capacity of a genius, but I do at least hope that they aren't all gibbering idiots and buffoons.'

It was the middle of a Friday and I had dropped in to see him during the course of my midday home visits. ‘Dad . . .'

‘Why on earth would someone as harmless as George Cotterill do something like that?' I hadn't yet told him what I knew about George's previous misdemeanours, but I wasn't allowed a chance to do it. ‘And how strong must the killer have been? George is in his sixties, for goodness' sake.'

‘He's quite fit and strong for his age.'

‘Pshaw!' This strange syllable – perhaps a relic of a lost, ancient tongue, or perhaps an imitation of a steam engine with the collywobbles – served to let me know that my progenitor had little truck with my arguments. He carried on what he was doing, which was searching through his large, unwieldy and over-ornate wardrobe. He had deposited various items of clothing – socks (all grey), casual shirts in various strikingly offensive colours, slacks (including a pair that were pale blue and, if I am totally honest, painful on the optic nerve) and woollen pullovers.

‘What are you doing? Is there a jumble sale?'

He stopped what he was doing – folding a vaguely grey pair of underpants that looked as though they had seen service on the Eastern Front during the Great War – and stared at me. ‘I'm packing,' he replied coldly.

‘What for?' For some reason I immediately leapt to the conclusion that he was off to hospital for an operation.

‘Ada and I are going to Brighton for the weekend,' he said. He was continuing to stare at me but I detected a degree of defensiveness in his words, as if he anticipated an adverse reaction to this announcement. In fact I was too stunned to say anything immediately, other than a slightly dazed, ‘Oh.'

He resumed his packing, searching under the bed for a few moments, in the end almost having to disappear completely under it. When he wriggled back out, he began to cough and was covered in dust, duck feathers and a small but extremely active spider. He produced an ancient brown suitcase that, with no little effort, he lifted on to the bed. When opened, I saw that it contained women's clothing, all carefully and reverentially folded. I knew at once what they were and in that instant, he saw me looking, saw that I knew, and quickly shut it again. There was an unmistakeable sense of embarrassment in the air of that room then, one that was reflected in the way that he kept his head low and muttered, ‘I'll finish this later.'

‘Dad . . .'

It was far from cold in his bedroom, but the ghost of my mother – my mother whom for some reason we rarely mentioned, perhaps because we had both loved her too much – was there with us, and even the most loved and loving of ghosts brings with it a chill. He asked so quickly that he interrupted me, ‘What is it, Lance?'

I hesitated, thought about saying nothing, then said as gently as I could, ‘There's no problem, you know, Dad.'

I was seeking to reassure him, but I think I not only failed, I made things worse; certainly for me, if not for him; being my dad, though, he merely frowned, then said a touch too loudly, ‘What on earth are you talking about, Lance? You're lapsing into feeble-mindedness again.'

I smiled. ‘You're right. I know.'

He nodded assertively. ‘I really don't understand it. Most of the time you seem to be quite bright, and then suddenly you stumble into meaningless lunacy. It's clearly not inherited; I blame the television.'

I loved him so much then that I felt tears hot in my eyes. He was thinking exactly what I was thinking – that Mum wouldn't mind him having a bit of female company in his life now that she was so long gone, that she had loved him too much to begrudge him that and that I should have kept my mouth shut. ‘You're probably right, Dad.' I had four more visits to make before evening surgery and used the excuse of these now to make my exit. ‘Where are you staying in Brighton?' I asked.

‘At the Grand,' was the reply, his tone suggesting that the notion of staying anywhere else was clearly yet another sign of my loopiness. ‘We're due there at seven.'

‘And you're back . . .?'

‘Sunday afternoon. We might stop off for lunch on the way, perhaps in Hurstpierpoint, or somewhere.'

‘Well, have a nice time.'

He smiled. ‘Thank you, Lance. I think I will.'

With which slightly gnomic remark, we parted.

FOURTEEN

I
've never been entirely sure why I decided to become a police surgeon; I hate being on call – it had always been the worst aspect of medicine for me – yet this entirely voluntarily (albeit paid) duty involved a lot of the bloody stuff. I suppose part of it was because my father had been one in his day and I rather love him; when I announced my decision to him, I was unaccountably moved almost to tears that he was so delighted. If I'm honest (which I try not to be and, as a doctor, tend not to be out of habit) part of it too was the money, and part of it was stupidity because we had just amalgamated with the London Road practice, so that the on-call rota had gone from one in three to one in seven; as a consequence of all this I had thought,
Why not?

Anyway, whatever the reason, the phone rang that Saturday night and I knew immediately that it wasn't Dad telling me how bracing the weather was down in Brighton. ‘Dr Elliot?'

It was Sergeant Abelson; she sounded bored. I, however, could have done without being called out; not that I was doing much, what with Max having disappeared two hours before because of a Great Dane with a brain tumour. ‘I was last time I checked.'

‘I'm afraid we need your help, Dr Elliot.'

‘Where?'

‘At the central nick in Croydon.'

‘What's the problem?' Usually it was drunk drivers.

‘One of our customers is complaining of chest pains.'

Which could mean anything, from complete fakery (far from unknown) to injuries unavoidably obtained when ‘resisting arrest' (also, lamentably, far from unknown). I looked at my watch. ‘Give me half an hour.'

‘No hurry,' she assured me.

Bruce Forsyth was doing what only he could do – making an imbecilic game show interesting
and
not making the contestants look undignified – but duty called. I was halfway through eating with some delight something I had recently discovered – ‘Toast Toppers' (strangely, Dad had looked at me with some despair when I had informed him of my epiphany) – but in no time at all I had polished these off, and then I was on my way. The traffic was light and the tarmac at least beginning to harden up as I drove into the centre of Croydon, along Wellesley Road and into Park Lane; I had special dispensation and parked in the police station's ample car park beside a heavily armoured police van. There was still plenty of light, although there was all about the late evening's crepuscular remnant of a hot day's dust, the kind that seems to hide more than it reveals, that seems to suffocate. The central police station had never been a particularly beautiful building – red-brick, rectangular, old before it was born, and possessing only the character of characterlessness. The entrance hall smelled of disinfectant; it might have been my imagination but I had the impression that it masked a faint tang of vomitus; at which, I suddenly wondered if it was poo. It wasn't that many years since the foundation stone of the imposing headquarters of the Croydon stretch of the thin blue line had first been laid but, internally at least, the constant battering and physical abuse from the less than enthusiastic customers had left their marks; there were holes in the wall caused either by fists or toecaps, while the once pristine magnolia emulsion was badly scuffed and covered in what I can only describe as an ‘interesting and thought-provoking' variety of graffiti (much of which was most appallingly spelt and gave me scant optimism in the Labour government's faith in comprehensive education).

Having presented my credentials, I was forced to wait for fifteen minutes in the company of a drunken gentleman of the road who possessed the reddest face, the longest beard and the most pungent body stench I have ever encountered (and believe me, I have worked in NHS casualty departments where I have experienced a fairly broad range of bad breath, body odour, gangrene and smelly feet). He mumbled a lot too, looking towards me but not at me; I moved to sit diagonally opposite him but it seemed to make no discernible difference in the intensity of his perfume, as if no matter how far I travelled, I was doomed to share the same atmosphere with this harbinger of pong for ever. During this time, there was a string of visitors, all in the company of police officers, all professing very little enthusiasm for their environment and all doing so in ripe language.

Eventually I was dragged away from the entertainment by a tall, saturnine constable who seemed not to notice that life's rich pageant was being displayed before him for his entertainment. Having asked of me briefly, ‘Dr Elliot?' and received an affirmative, he punched a five-digit code into a lock on a door, carefully shielding his actions with his other hand and thereby demonstrating a highly commendable attitude towards security, despite the fact that it was only the drunk and I who were in the room at the time, and he was a good twenty feet away. He led me down a short corridor, then down two flights of stairs, then along another, longer corridor; the atmosphere improved for a short while, then deteriorated again, although now the overwhelming note was one of perspiration and cabbage stewed for a week or two, so that it had been turned back into primeval pond life. My guide saying nothing, I decided to make a venture at conversation as we walked along the drab corridor.

‘Busy night so far?' I asked, by way of a start on this resolve. My escort looked at me, his expression suggesting that he had heard there was an imbecile in the vicinity and nothing else that he could see would fit the bill so perfectly. He said after a short pause and in a voice that was both sepulchral and vexed, ‘It's not yet nine o'clock and the cells are already almost full.'