Blood in Grandpont (2 page)

It took him approximately seven minutes to cycle home, home being a spacious and comfortable house in the very desirable Bainton Road, overlooking to the front the sports grounds of St John’s College, and to the rear the canal. Negotiating entry to the house took very nearly another five minutes: entry through the front door; unlocking and unbolting of the back door; unbolting the side gate and wheeling the bike through it; bolting the gate again; and then locking the bike to the immovable object of a metal bar that he had had fixed on to the back wall of the house. Alan Tull had no intention of making the life of either bike thieves or house breakers easy.

He had barely re-entered the house when he heard the doorbell ring violently. He started, despite the fact that he was expecting a visitor, and then walked reluctantly through the kitchen, along the short corridor, and across the hall.

‘Good afternoon, Graham,’ he said as he opened the door, trying to pretend that it was just a social visit.

The man who stood framed in the entrance was, in contrast to the angular Alan Tull, short and stocky. The doctor knew that he could be little over 30, yet he had already conceded much ground in the battle against baldness, not to mention the battle of the bulge. What remained of his hair was still defiantly black, but despite the circumstances Alan Tull was sufficiently vain to feel smugly pleased that his own grey hair was more abundant even at his age.
‘Do come in,’ he said with a welcoming gesture.

Graham Drabble gave a curt grunt and thrust himself past his host into the hall. ‘Is anyone else here?’ he demanded.

Alan Tull shut the door, and shook his head. ‘Just me.’

‘In that case, let’s get it said here, and then I’ll go. I’ve no wish to stay longer than I must.’

‘It’s good of you—’ Alan began, but he never completed his ingratiating response, because Drabble had launched forcefully into the attack.

‘I want you to resign, Doctor, and if you don’t, I will make it my job to run you out of the medical profession.’

Alan Tull gulped. He had been expecting a rocky ride, but the bluntness of Drabble’s approach caught him unawares, and he felt a surge of nausea rise from his stomach. ‘Please, Graham,’ he said feebly. ‘Let’s talk about it calmly, reasonably.’

‘I’m perfectly calm, Tull,’ Drabble replied loudly, ‘and I have thought things through with all of my reason. Just answer this one question. Are you going to resign?’

‘Of course not!’ came the reply, less feeble this time. ‘Everyone makes mistakes from time to time.’

‘From time to time!’ There was incredulity in his voice. ‘The fact is, Tull, that for six months you misdiagnosed my mother. It took you half a year to refer her for a scan, and because of your incompetence she’s going to die long before she should have done. And none too pleasantly, either!’ His voice, at first a noisy bluster, had become strident with distress. ‘Either you resign, or I’ll hound you until you’re struck off the medical register.’

Tull felt his heart pounding. It was fear, and he knew it, though part of him – the rational part – told him that he had no reason to be afraid because he couldn’t possibly be struck off for what had happened. But he knew he could have done better, should have spotted it sooner. He felt guilty about that. ‘Graham,’ he said, summoning up all the shreds of assertiveness that were scattered around his body, ‘the BMA is not going to find against me for this. You know they won’t. I’m sorry, really sorry, but no good will come
of this. I’ve known your mother for years. She’s been a patient at the practice for almost as long as I’ve been a GP. What we should be doing is concentrating on providing her with the best possible care. It’s amazing what can be done, nowadays.’

Drabble laughed, a single high-pitched explosion that ricocheted around the room with such force that Tull almost ducked to avoid it. ‘Next thing is you’ll be telling me that she was your favourite patient!’ And Drabble laughed again.

‘I don’t have favourites.’ Alan Tull prided himself on his professionalism, and even in the midst of stress this controlled his reaction. ‘Of course, I care a lot about my long-standing patients. I get fond of them. That’s only natural.’

‘You get fond of them!’ The tone of Drabble’s statement made Tull look at him sharply. He might be a bit bumbling, but Tull was no fool, and instinctively he realized that their conversation was leading into deeper, more dangerous waters.

‘Would you rather I hated them?’ he retorted, but he was floundering. He was paddling in the sea, the water was up to his knees, the sand was sucking at his feet and the tide was coming in.

‘Fondness is a dangerous thing,’ Drabble was saying. ‘Especially when the object of your fondness is a vulnerable, trusting woman, and you are unable to keep your feelings under control, Doctor. I was looking on the web only the other day. It’s amazing how many GPs get struck off for sexually abusing their patients.’

Tull gulped, and his mouth gaped, but at first no sound came out, as the sickening reality of where this was all leading dawned on him. His right hand pulled distractedly at his thinning hair, until finally some words came. ‘What are you accusing me of,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Because I can assure you I have never—’

‘Who are they going to believe, Doctor? You, or the testimony of a dying or – by the time it comes to a head – dead woman? And does it matter, anyway, when rumour and gossip is so much more effective than the laboured progress of justice? If you don’t resign, and soon, your reputation will be ruined. The choice is yours, Doctor!’

‘Marjorie would never say I abused her,’ Tull insisted, his face now the colour of the palest parchment. ‘Never!’

‘First you abused her medically, and then you abused her sexually. That’s what her testimony will confirm.’

‘But she can’t say that. It’s not true,’ he said desperately.

‘Oh, but she will,’ Drabble said harshly, before he turned towards the door and wrenched it open. ‘I’ll give you a couple of days to think it over, Doctor,’ he snarled. ‘Then I’ll take action.’

At the same time as Graham Drabble was uttering his final threat, Sarah Russell was sitting – another world and half a continent away – in the café of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. One of the perks she had established for herself as administrator of Cornforth was to be one of the staff who, each October, supervised a select group of students on a visit to Venice. Sometimes she wondered about the educational benefits of these trips, but they were valued by the parents and even more so by their offspring. No doubt both parties were glad of some time off from the other. Right now, she herself was off duty, while one of the museum staff took the students round some of the key paintings and sculptures in the collection. Opposite her sat Maria Tull, née Scarpa, whose fluency in Italian, family connections in Venice, and knowledge of art were three compelling reasons why she – despite not being a member of the college staff – was the other regular adult presence on these Venetian trips.

They had been sitting there, each with a cappuccino, in an uncompanionable silence for some ten minutes. Sarah was studying the menu, although they had already agreed to eat at a café they had identified as they walked to the museum from the Academia Vaporetto stop. Maria was leafing through a copy of
Vogue
magazine, and was enjoying reading the Italian language again as much as she was scouting out the upcoming styles. When she reached the end, she looked up and pushed it across the table.

‘You ought to take a look,’ she said.

Sarah abandoned her feigned interest in the menu and looked
across at her companion.

‘Ought I?’ There was sharpness in her voice. ‘Why?’

‘Well, look at you!’ Maria said, waving her arm expansively. ‘You could still be an attractive woman if you tried. Of course, ideally you ought to lose some weight, but even so.’ She paused, allowing the jibe to sink in. ‘Have you not looked at the women of Venice, and the way they dress? They have style, they think a lot about their appearance, and the men appreciate it.’

‘I’ll dress the way I want,’ Sarah said firmly, conscious that they were in a public place, and conscious too that she could never compete with Maria in the style or figure stakes.

‘You need to try a bit harder, dear,’ she said leaning forward conspiratorially. ‘Take it from me.’

‘When I want your advice,’ Sarah hissed, ‘I’ll ask for it.’

Maria looked back, her smile and gaze unwavering. ‘Did Dominic ring you this morning?’

Sarah stiffened, and leant back, as if to put more space between the two of them. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because, my dear, he rang me. He wanted to know if I’d had any luck with finding a new source for him. He’s probably told you he’s fallen out with Carlo?’

Sarah winced. Dominic never told her anything about his business. So of course he hadn’t told her about Carlo. He had decided early on in their marriage that she wasn’t the asset he needed in the world of antiques, and so he had looked around for someone else to assist him. First it had been James, until he’d done a runner with his brother’s wife, leaving his own wife with three children under five, and then it had been Maria. The fashionable, antique loving, half-Italian bitch who sat opposite her now and dared to lecture her on how she should bloody well dress to keep that bastard of a husband interested. She knew only too well how to keep him interested, and it didn’t involve the latest Italian fashions.

‘Just remember,’ Sarah said icily, fighting back the fury inside, ‘Cornforth employs you to look after the students, not to go antique
hunting round Venice.’

Maria smiled, conscious that she had got under Sarah’s skin, but conscious too that she needed her cooperation. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? But I would like some time off tonight or tomorrow. No doubt you do too?’ The smile got even broader. ‘Why don’t you choose? And I’ll fit in round you.’

Sarah nodded. ‘I’ll think about it.’ They were the words of surrender, reluctantly given.

Maria stood up, her mission accomplished. ‘
Perfetto, mia cara
!’ she gushed loudly. ‘I’ll go and find our students. You enjoy the magazine!’

Sarah watched her move across the floor. She moved smoothly. Despite her high heels, she seemed always to move smoothly, even up and down and across the many bridges and steps of Venice. Not for the first time, Sarah wondered about Maria and her own husband. Not that they were conducting an affair: she was pretty sure of that. If anyone was at risk from Dominic in that department, it was most likely Minette, that pretty little nineteen-year-old back in Oxford. But Maria and Dominic were up to something. She was damned sure of that.

Lucy Tull arrived home just before 5.30 p.m. Unlike her father, she locked and left her bike in the front garden before entering the house. Her mother was in Venice, and Joseph was rarely back at this hour, so when she heard noises from the study, she divined quite correctly that her father must be home.

‘Hello Daddy,’ she called cheerily, pushing the door open.

‘Hello, dear.’ The slurred reply and the half-empty bottle of whisky on the desk told its own story.

‘Daddy!’ she exclaimed. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

The alarm in her voice failed to register with him. He smiled goofily at her and raised his glass. ‘Just having a snifter,’ he burbled.

Lucy was used to dealing with challenging behaviour at the dental surgery. Patients who panicked just as they were about to be
injected, and patients who turned up late and then got stroppy because they were told to come back another day. In such circumstances, she believed in decisive action. She moved swiftly forward, detaching the glass from her father with one hand, and picking up the bottle with the other. ‘That’s quite enough,’ she said, as if she was his mother and he was a naughty boy.

He looked at her, squinting slightly, his head at an angle.

‘So, are you going to tell me why you’re drinking at this time of day?’ she asked firmly.

He whimpered plaintively. ‘All right.’ Then, slowly and not very steadily, he proceeded to tell her all about Graham Drabble’s visit and the background to it. ‘I’m ruined,’ he said at the end, and began to sob. ‘What am I going to do?’

Lucy, who had remained standing throughout, looked down at him in disgust. She wanted a father who would stand up and fight for himself, not a quitter. She loved him dearly, but right now that feeling was buried deep beneath others.

‘Have you told Maria?’ she asked, for she refused to refer to her stepmother in any other terms.

‘She’s in Venice,’ he mumbled, as if mobile phones had never been invented.

‘I know she’s in Venice,’ she snapped irritably. ‘For God’s sake,’ she continued after a pause, ‘we can’t just do nothing!’

‘But what can we do?’

‘I’ll have to see Marjorie, and speak to her myself.’

‘Yes,’ he responded vacantly, glad that someone else was taking the responsibility.

‘I’ll see if I can reason with her. Get her to see how wrong Graham’s course of action is.’

‘Perhaps I should do it,’ her father said unconvincingly.

‘They won’t let you anywhere near her,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll do it, Daddy, but best not to tell Maria if she rings, not yet.’

He looked at her, gratitude and relief apparent in his moist eyes. ‘Lucy dear, you’re my angel, you really are.’

At 8.20 a.m. the following Saturday, a tall woman, wearing a black trouser suit and red silk blouse, boarded the Oxford Tube at Gloucester Green station in the centre of Oxford and walked to the back of the bus – for despite its name, a bus was what it was. She sat down at the back, on the driver’s side just in front of the toilet. She took the window seat for herself, but placed her handbag and mackintosh on the one next to her. She was, to all intents and purposes, a woman determined to ensure her own privacy.

At Queen Street, in St Clement’s, and at three different stops in Headington, the bus steadily collected more passengers, the majority paying their money and then making their way past her and up the stairs. The last pick-up in Oxford was on the very outskirts, at the Thornhill park and ride stop. Four people got on there, the first three being an elderly couple and a girl of maybe eight or nine. Behind this grandparental trio, there trailed a middle-aged woman. Her round face was framed by straight,
fake-blonde
hair that almost brushed her shoulders, and she wore a black three-quarter-length mackintosh and a blank expression that flickered only once as she made her way laboriously down the aisle. She needed, Geraldine Payne thought unkindly, to lose some weight.