Deadly Friends (11 page)

‘Oh. So do you want me to cancel the table?’

‘No, of course not, as long as we are not too late.’

‘Do you want me to take you down?’

‘That’s kind of you, but I’m not sure when I will be coming back.’

‘Why? How long are you thinking of staying?’

‘Only until Sunday or Monday.’

‘So where will you stay?’

‘I’m not sure at the moment. At Xav’s, perhaps, or he’ll find a hotel for me. He’s paying my expenses and a fee.’

There must have been something in the way I said: ‘Oh.’

‘Charles, what are you suggesting?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m just missing you, Annabelle. Xav knows he’s found someone special, and he’s got me worried, that’s all.’

‘Don’t be silly, Charles,’ she replied. ‘I’ll look forward to seeing you on Friday.’

I put the phone down and prayed for the biggest blizzard to hit the North since the Great Ice Age. I had a sandwich – banana, honey and a sprinkling of cocoa –
and caught up with the news on TV. They were having it bad down South, but they always are.

I took a shower and went to bed reasonably early. Then I remembered that I had no ironed shirts. I got up and hung a couple over the shower head, in the hope that the creases would drop out overnight. I dreamt about operating on Genghis to remove a piano from his brain, on the deck of an open boat with only an electric iron for a scalpel and big waves crashing over us.

‘What have we got?’ I asked. We were seating ourselves around my desk again. Nigel carefully lowered three steaming mugs and sat down.

‘Custard creams,’ Sparky replied.

‘Pass ’em over, then, please.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Nigel said. ‘Wait a minute. Where did that come from?’

Sparky followed his gaze to the wall behind my desk and smiled. Natasha had written: ‘To Charlie, with lots of love, Natasha Wilde’, on her photograph, with four kisses, and I’d pinned her on the wall next to my new calendar from the Bamboo Curtain.

‘She’s dotted that last i in an unfortunate place,’ he observed.

‘I hadn’t noticed,’ I said.

‘I take it you had a successful meeting,’ Nigel declared. ‘She’s a very nice lady.’

‘Find anything useful,’ Sparky asked, ‘apart from her telephone number and her favourite tipple?’

‘Mmm. She confirmed that the doc was knocking somebody off at the clinic, presumably the registrar’s wife that we already know about; about eighteen months ago he mysteriously stopped playing squash; and, sometime in the past, he’s been accused of malpractice.’

‘Malpractice?’ Nigel said. ‘What was that about?’

‘She didn’t know. Can you look into it, please? Try the General Medical Council.’

‘Right. And what’s so special about giving up squash?’

‘Nothing. She was just trying to be helpful. One minute he was a keen player, then he stopped, that’s all.’

‘Perhaps he had a recurring injury. It happens all the time.’

‘Yep.’

Sparky chipped in with: ‘You said he was knocking someone off at the clinic.’

‘Mmm.’

‘The registrar works at the General. Was this a different one?’

‘Sugar! I don’t know. I’m certain she said the clinic. Maybe she meant the hospital. What’s the difference between a clinic and a hospital?’

‘I think your mind wasn’t on the job,’ Sparky said.

‘You could be right,’ I admitted. ‘Let’s try to check it from this end. What did you two find?’

Nigel said the parents were bearing up remarkably
well. Doctoring was the family business – they were both GPs. He’d come away with the names of a few friends and had promised to have a word with the coroner about releasing the body for a funeral.

‘And at the hospital?’ I asked, turning to Sparky.

‘Nothing worthwhile. To be honest, there seems to have been a great deal of affection for the doctor, from both sexes. Everybody agrees that he was a fine doctor and a good bloke. He had his flings, but he was a gentleman with it.’

‘Sounds a bit like me,’ I said.

‘Just what I thought, Charlie. So I collared the registrar and asked him if he knew that the doctor, or consultant, to be precise, had been shagging his wife.’

‘I hope you weren’t so circumspect,’ I said. ‘The first rule of good interviewing is to be unambiguous.’

‘Well, actually, I told him that I’d heard rumours. He said he’d heard the same rumours, but as he and his good lady were leading separate lives and just keeping up appearances until the kids went to college, he wasn’t bothered.’

‘Mmm. Interesting. Did you push it?’

‘You bet. I asked him where he was on the night in question. He and his wife threw a dinner party for eight neighbours. It’s something they do monthly, or thereabouts, rotating round each other’s houses.’

‘Keeping up appearances.’

‘Quite. He’s given me a list of names.’

‘Let’s have ’em checked. Anything else, either of you?’

‘Yes, there is,’ Nigel replied, blushing like a schoolboy about to present his parents with a favourable report. ‘I took Dr Jordan’s letters and cards to his parents, but copied most of it. His bank statement made interesting reading. Apart from his salaries there were deposits of three hundred, three hundred and fifty, and another three hundred, at monthly intervals. I checked his previous statements and it’s been going on for nearly two years. The amounts vary, but it’s usually three hundred, three hundred and fifty, or occasionally four hundred, at the end of the month.’

‘Maybe he does some other work,’ I suggested. ‘He could be on a retainer, or something.’

‘And doesn’t pay tax on it?’

‘How do you know he doesn’t pay tax on it?’

‘Because if he declared it it wouldn’t come out at such a round figure.’

I said: ‘I don’t know who you’ve been mixing with, lately, Nigel, but you’re developing a terribly suspicious mind.’

‘There was one exception. Last September the payment was missed, but there was a double payment in October. In the doctor’s diary,’ he went on, ‘I came across an entry at the appropriate time that said: “AJKW not paid, ring him.” That’s all.’

‘So you reckon that these payments are coming from someone called AJKW.’

‘Yes.’

‘Any ideas who it is?’

‘Yes,’ he declared with undisguised triumph.

‘Go on.’

‘Last night, in the absence of a better offer, I took the telephone directory to bed with me.’

‘I have nights like that,’ Sparky interrupted.

‘Shut up,’ I told him.

‘I worked my way through the Ws and found an entry for A.J.K. Weatherall. It only took a couple of minutes. It’s got to be the same person. Odds of it not being are about equal to your chances of winning the lottery. And he’s a chemist in Heckley, which clinches it, I’d say.’

‘You mean … a pharmacist chemist?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Sheest!’ I sat back and whistled through my teeth.

Nigel bit into a custard cream and had a sip of his tea. I popped one in whole and took a swig. Sparky dunked.

When we’d swallowed the biscuits and digested the information, Sparky said: ‘So what do you reckon? They were scamming the NHS?’

Long time ago, when the Earth was young and sex came before marriage only in very cheap dictionaries, prescriptions were free and professional people were assumed to be honest. Things have changed since then. The price of a prescription is now often four or five times the cost of the medicine it procures. ‘Ah!’ says the Health Minister, gleefully. ‘But sixty per cent of patients are exempt from paying the charges.’ They draw perverse satisfaction from the fact that most of
the nation’s sick fall below some arbitrary poverty level. Their logic escapes me.

Pharmacists recognise the injustice. Some of the more unscrupulous ones tear up the prescriptions and pocket the difference for themselves. Others just sell the medicine to the customer at the market price and are happy with the profit on that. Either way, it’s called fraud. It is OK for the Government to rip us off, but not enterprising individuals.

But that wasn’t what was happening here. A chemist could do that in the privacy of his own shop. No collusion was required with a sympathetic general practitioner. If Nigel had stumbled on something, it was much more serious.

‘Fake prescriptions,’ I said. ‘Do you think we’re talking fake prescriptions?’

‘I’d say it’s a strong possibility,’ Nigel replied.

‘You mean,’ Sparky began, ‘some friendly doctor makes out a few hundred prescriptions for patients who haven’t been anywhere near his surgery, and the chemist claims the fees for not dispensing any drugs?’

‘A very succinct summary, I’d say, David,’ Nigel agreed. ‘And they share the proceeds,’ I added.

‘Four hundred quid a month. That’s eight hundred if they’re sharing equally. How many prescriptions is that?’

‘Haven’t a clue,’ Nigel admitted. ‘I’ve considered having a word with Fraud. What do you think, Charlie?’

‘Yeah, good idea,’ I said. ‘They’re bound to know more about it than we do.’ I thought about it for a second, then decided: ‘No. Bugger Fraud – they’ll take for ever. Let’s have a word with A.J.K. Weatherall ourselves and ask him what it’s all about. After lunch. First of all let’s have it all down on paper and tagged for the computer.’

For the first time I felt optimistic. Something of the thrill of the chase was welling up inside me, like I always get when an investigation turns the corner. You gather the facts and they don’t make sense, until, hopefully, a simple piece of information comes along and everything starts to fall into place. We hadn’t reached that stage, yet, but things were moving.

Maggie knocked on the door and popped her head round it, which was the cue for Sparky to jump up and gather our mugs together.

‘Private party or can anyone join in?’ she asked.

‘Have a warm seat,’ Sparky told her as he sidled past in the doorway.

‘Don’t drop the teabags in the bin,’ she called after him.

‘We’ve finished, come in, Maggie,’ I said.

She sat down and sniffed. ‘It stinks of fish and chips in here,’ she declared.

‘It’s that lot,’ I said, vaguely waving towards the main office.

‘Good grief, where did she come from?’

I turned round and met Natasha Wilde’s ample
charms, captured on Kodak paper. ‘Present from a grateful customer,’ I boasted.

‘Did you dot that i?’

‘No I didn’t! What do you think I am?’

‘Hurrumph! Did you get my message? I missed you yesterday.’

‘I’m sorry, Maggie. I never realised you cared so much.’

‘I meant … You know what I mean.’

‘Right. About the white towels and the street light.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Doesn’t help us much, does it? How is she?’

‘She’s a brave lady. I told her the score, how he’d play his defence. She realises that the chances of a prosecution are slim. She was washing sheets and blankets when I went round. Said it was the tenth time. She’s too scared to have little Dilly with her for the time being and says she now sleeps in Dilly’s bed with the light on.’

‘Did you tell her that he’d done it before?’

‘I said we had suspicions.’

‘What was her reaction?’

‘She wasn’t surprised. Said it was only a matter of time before he killed someone.’

‘If he hasn’t already,’ I said, and told her about the doctor living in the same block of flats.

‘Really?’ she said, leaning forward. ‘And apart from that, have you found anything else to link them?’

I shook my head. ‘Not a sausage. I’ve asked all the mobiles to keep an eye out for him, and Jeff Caton’s
arranging for some casual observations to be done. If we can’t get him for rape we might be able to clip his wings for a while.’

‘It’s more than his wings I’d like to clip. He went out in a taxi last night.’

‘Damn! He’s reading our minds. Give her plenty of attention, Maggie,’ I said. ‘Until she starts to feel more secure. Ask her if a panic button would help. That’s about all we can offer.’

‘It’s not much, is it?’

‘No.’

The pharmacy was in a parade of shops on the Sweetwater side of town. Better class council houses give way to a posh estate where the roses grow up pergolas and they have tit boxes on the walls instead of satellite dishes. The sad irony is that the birds prefer nesting in the satellite dishes. It was sandwiched between a unisex hair salon and a wine store, or a barber’s and an
off-licence
if you came from the council estate.

‘Why do they call themselves unisex hairdresser’s when they do both sexes?’ Nigel wondered as he swung into the layby that fronted the shops.

‘Because bisexual hairdresser would have other connotations,’ I told him.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Do you want to go round the back while I kick the front door in, or do you want to kick it in while I cover the back?’

A woman came out of the pharmacy fiddling with her handbag.

‘They’re open,’ Nigel said.

‘This job’s not what it used to be,’ I grumbled. ‘Come on, let’s have a walk round.’

We passed the fronts of a greengrocer’s and an
all-purpose
store that had baby clothes and model cars in the window. A poster said the local dramatic society wanted players for their next production – Iolanthe – and someone had lost a dog. Cars and four-
wheel-drives
driven by women were coming and going, buying something for tea after picking up the kids. What a life. We turned the corner, into the service road that ran behind the shops.

There were the usual dumpsters and piles of empty boxes. The greengrocer had taken a delivery of Cape oranges and still had a few Christmas trees left. At the far end of the parade a butcher’s van was unloading a carcass. Across the lane was a row of garages-cum-storerooms, one per shop. The door to A.J.K. Weatherall’s was wide open and his car was inside.

He owned a Lotus.

‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘What’s that worth?’

‘Six years old … Oh, about twelve or fifteen thousand, at a guess.’

‘And about thirty thousand new?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Let’s go talk to him.’

We completed our circuit of the block. Passing the back of the butcher’s I tried not to inhale and wished I had the willpower to go vegetarian. Trouble is, I like my steaks.