In the Teeth of Adversity
Read In the Teeth of Adversity Online
Authors: Marian Babson
OF ADVERSITY
Marian Babson
CHIVERS
This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.
Published by arrangement with the Author
Epub ISBN 9781471310317
Copyright © 1990 Marian Babson
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental
Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com
Chapter 1
Simple things amuse simple minds. I was deriving quite a bit of amusement from the early edition of the evening paper. I had just made a note of the rapidly rising actress on page seven, who had been photographed against the background of her antique silver collection, holding the prize piece of carved jade from her treasury of objets d'art, and captioned by a melancholy quote saying how much she was going to miss her little mews cottage and her treasures during the next three months when she would be filming in Spain. I underscored her name and made a notation to get in touch with her after the burglary, when she would be looking for another â and brighter â public relations person.
“Stop that!” I shouted as a bandit-masked whirlwind sprang from an ambush of late-afternoon shadows and hurled herself at my Biro. Capturing it successfully, she tumbled over and over across the desk, kicking at it with her hind legs and uttering loud yowls of defiance.
You had to laugh at the little clown. A fact she constantly used against me. “Behave yourself.” I tried to recapture the Biro, but she rolled away from me with it, growling as though she really meant it. Only the rakish tilt of her ears betrayed her playfulness.
“Come on, give it back.” I feinted for it again, and her tail lashed menacingly, her slanted blue eyes glittering. She was having a lovely time.
“Be a good cat,” I said. I had dropped the paper by now and she had my full attention. Which was what she'd wanted all along.
Suddenly, she abandoned the game. The Biro dropped from her mouth and rolled across the desk unnoticed. She was taut and alert, blue eyes staring at the door. I followed her look, seeing nothing but the closed door. After a moment, though, I heard it, too.
Someone was taking the stairs two at a time. Someone gained the tiny hallway and pounded on the door, but didn't wait for any social niceties like being invited to enter. He burst through the door, slamming it behind him and leaning against it, looking around wildly, gasping for breath. His eyes were bulging, his face purple, but he was just recognizable â the white coat helped.
I gazed at him in mild amazement. True, I was three or four months overdue for my semi-annual checkup, but you don't really expect your dentist to get
emotional
over a fact like that. Particularly, as Gerry and I were practically the only National Health patients he had on his eminent and star-studded roster of Famous Mouths I Have Looked Into.
“You've got to help me,” he choked. “You've got to help me,
now.
Quickly!”
It was a good line, and probably one he had picked up from patients ringing in the middle of the night with throbbing abscesses. But it seemed to be slightly misdirected.
“Are you sure you have the right place?” That was as near as I dared get to asking him if he knew where he was. “This is Perkins and Tate â”
“Public Relations, Limited,” he finished for me. “Of course, it's the right place. Public relations â that's what I need right now. God! How I need public relations!”
It was a statement to warm the cockles of many a heart at the Institute of Public Relations, but it simply made
my
blood run cold. I mean, public relations isn't usually something you need immediately, like a fix, or a stiff drink. If you do, it means the horse has bolted, the barn has burned to the ground, the ground has caved into a previously unsuspected mineshaft, and somebody is handing you a rusty hasp and demanding that you put it all back the way it was.
Pandora glared at him, twitching her nose, then abruptly dived under the desk, hissing. She had recently had the last of her booster shots, and men in white jackets smelling, however faintly, of antiseptic were at the top of her Hate Parade.
He ignored her; I doubt that he even noticed her. He was still staring wildly in my general direction, waiting for me to wave the magic wand and make everything all right again.
“Why don't you sit down, and we'll talk this over,” I suggested.
“Sit down? We haven't time! We've got to get into action now, you fool! Don't you understand? She's dead. Morgana Fane! She died under the anaesthetic in
my
dental chair. My God!
Morgana Fane
!”
I instantly needed a stiff drink myself. Morgana Fane â the Model of the Moment â of this decade. About to be the Bride of the Year. That mesmeric face, which had decorated a thousand magazine covers, launched a thousand styles, and â it was rumoured in the peephole press â shipwrecked a few dozen marriages, now stilled forever. It was the end of an Era.
Fortunately, the company was fairly solvent at the moment, and there was a bottle of Scotch in the kitchen cupboard. Going for it, I asked, “What did the police say about it?”
“I haven't called them!” He was affronted. “Not yet. That's why I came to you. I want a press representative with me before I do.”
Oh, fine. At the rate he was going, a solicitor would be more help when the police arrived. They were not going to take kindly to playing second fiddle to a public relations man. Although I appreciated the good dentist's problem. A society/show business practice, of the kind he had built up, depends on word-of-mouth recommendations and confidence. Lots of confidence. He could go out of style as fast as an old-fashioned abortionist if the death of a famous patient wasn't handled properly. Faster. And Morgana Fane â I found myself echoing the dentist â my God!
“Didn't she respond at all to the kiss of life?” I turned just in time to catch the shifty look that flashed across his face. He hadn't bothered to try. He'd been too worried about his own skin. He'd flown for a press representative â probably leaving her still there in the chair.
That
would look great in the headlines.
I took the drink I had poured for him and put it back in the cupboard beside the bottle â Gerry could drink it later. We were going to have enough problems without our dentist facing the music with liquor on his breath. It would be all the press needed â and I didn't think the police would react too favourably to it, either.
“There was no point in trying,” he defended hastily, having evidently caught the look that flashed across
my
face just before I turned away. “Any fool could tell that she was gone.”
There was a steady hissing sound emanating from beneath the desk. I just looked at him, my face as blank as I could possibly make it. I felt like joining Pandora under the desk for a hissing session, but it was a luxury I was denied.
This expensive dentist had not carried Perkins & Tate (Public Relations) Ltd. on his National Health books just because he could not resist our winsome faces. It was one of those tacit understandings, and Gerry and I had dutifully seen to it that his name was planted in a few columns and the discreet mention was inserted wherever possible. Very discreet â the dental profession being as twitchy as the medical on the subject of publicity. It had worked quite well and to our mutual satisfaction for several years. This time, however, the piper was really presenting the bill â and with a vengeance.
“She's still there,” I said flatly. Just checking, I didn't expect any contradiction.
I didn't get one. “Right where she expired,” he said. His face twitched with indignation. “In
my
dental chair!” He made it sound as though the only decent thing she could have done was to crawl into an anonymous gutter to die.
“What about your nurse?”
“She wasn't there today. Fortunately, she has the flu.” It was obvious that he was grateful for a woman with some grasp of fundamental decencies.
“Does anyone know you've come here?” That was the first thing. If we could cover his tracks to Perkins & Tate, we might have a chance of retrieving the situation.
“I didn't tell anyone â if that's what you mean. And no one saw me leave the office.”
That checked out. The reception and waiting rooms were on the ground floor, the torture chambers were upstairs. The front door opened into the hallway and faced the stairs; you had to detour through a door on the left into the reception area and the waiting room. The nurse notified you when your number had come up, and with a brave smile, you went through the door and up the stairs to whatever doom awaited you. The door was always closed, presumably so that the nervous clientele in the waiting room couldn't see the victims staggering out after they had been worked on.
Since Endicott Zayle hadn't had the bad luck to encounter someone actually entering as he was slipping out, he would not have been seen. If we could get him back in again without being seen, there might be a fighting chance.
“When did this happen?”
He seemed calmer, now that he had thrown the burden on someone else's shoulders. “About ten minutes ago.”
That wasn't so bad. If he'd had to go and call in the wrong people, at least he hadn't let any grass grow under his feet about it. He didn't seem wholly aware of the enormity of what he had done, or how it would sound if the papers got hold of it. He was too concerned with the fact of her death to consider his own desertion of her.
“How did you get here?”
“I took a taxi.”
He must have been fairly conspicuous in that white jacket. Could we take a chance that no taxi driver would remember? Even a doctor on the most urgent emergency call would throw on a coat before going out in weather like this. But taxi drivers, as a whole, are the most sophisticated social group in England, as well as the most discreet. With good reason â if they told all they knew, a few bastions of our society would crumble, and we don't have all that many left.
“You didn't do anything silly” â it was better to find out the worst right away â “like keeping the taxi waiting, did you?”
“Certainly not.” He bristled. “I realize it wouldn't look too well if the police discovered I came to you before I called them.”
It would look bloody awful, but I was relieved to find he had some inkling of the fact.
“Naturally, I've prepared a story in advance,” he said. “In case they find out.”
This cheered me a bit more. Perhaps he was brighter than he had previously given indication of being. “What story?” I asked hopefully.
“I shall say” â a crafty light glittered in the depths of his tiny eyes â “Everything Went Black. And when I came to, I was here.” He waited triumphantly for my applause.
I looked at him bleakly. To get away with that one, you have to be 36-22-34 and preferably blond. At 44-52-58 and going bald, it just wasn't on. I tried to break it to him gently. “That one went out with âI didn't know the gun was loaded' ”
He bristled, about to take umbrage again, when the steady hissing sound from under the desk unnerved him. “What's that?” He looked around uneasily. “Is something going to explode?”
“Only the cat,” I said.
“Cat?” Locating the source of the sound, he crouched to look under the desk.
Lashing her tail, Pandora retreated, switching from a hiss to a growl. She knew his sort, she informed him. They petted you and chucked you under the chin and called you sweet names, and just when you were preening yourself that you'd made a new conquest, they jabbed a dirty great needle into your rump.
“I don't think she likes me,” he said.
“She's shy,” I said. “Don't worry about her.” It seemed superfluous to tell him to worry about himself; it was amazing that anything could distract him from that absorbing concern.
He and Pandora continued staring at each other, which, ordinarily, would have been all right. However, it was wasting time, and back at the surgery, his partner, a restless patient, or even a just-recovered nurse might open the door to his office and discover the Corpse of the Year â with the dentist gone missing. Even the most loyal partner might be forgiven for jumping to conclusions under those circumstances â not to mention the police.
