Second Opinion (19 page)

‘Nearly there,’ he said, as the car swept round into the main road leading down to Shadwell. ‘The Rag and Bottle. That’s the local name for the Flag and Flask, you know, and —’

‘Yeah. And Christopher Columbus discovered America,’ George said. ‘For God’s sake, Gus, it wasn’t the locals who renamed it — it was the hospital people! In the old days anaesthetics were given by dripping ether on to a piece of cloth held over the patient’s nose and mouth and that was called a rag and bottle anaesthetic.’

‘Trust you to know best,’ he said, pulling the car to a slightly squealing stop beside the cluster of police cars with their blue lights flashing waiting outside the pub. ‘Come on. Let’s get some work done.’

Sergeant Dudley detached himself from the untidy group of people standing near the cars and came loping over to him. ‘Wotcha, Guv. Nice time. Round the back here, in the car park — Oh. Evening, doctor.’

‘Evening, Roop,’ George said, knowing how much he hated the diminutive form of his name and delighting in using it; he’d only offered his meagre greeting because she’d pushed herself forward and stared at him challengingly over Gus’s shoulder. He glared back at her, then turned away to lead them to the car park.

It lay behind the pub at the end of a curving roughly
surfaced private alley. Vividly bright Tilley lamps burned all along the way, set there by the police, and at the far end, where the alley entered the wide gravelled car park proper, there was another huddle of people.

It broke apart as Rupert arrived and shouldered his way in; people stepped back to let Gus and George follow in easily. At the centre the sprawled body lay.

All George could see at first were the clothes; the legs, the right one bent at a sharp angle that showed clearly there was a fracture there, were covered in dark blue jeans, which even under these circumstances showed as fairly new, and the feet were encased in white trainers of the sort that looked trendy but were, in fact, cheap. George had seen some very like them in Watney Street Market piled hugger-mugger in boxes marked ‘cut price’. There was an equally new-looking anorak in dark red covering the upper part of the torso, and on the back of the head — the corpse was lying face down — a woolly cap of the sort that Rastafarians wore. That alone of the clothes looked old and dirty and was well stained with hair oil.

‘Not his own hat, then,’ Gus said, looking down at the corpse, but making no attempt to touch or move it. ‘What else?’

‘Not a Rastafarian, anyway. Dark, all right, but not West Indian. Come round here, have a look. Asian, I’d say.’

Gus moved round to the other side of the corpse, George following him, and bent down. George could see only the back of Gus’s head as his bulk obscured the view of the dead face, so she moved round a little more to peer over his shoulder.

And heard herself saying, ‘Christ!’ in a sort of half-shriek as she stared down at the now clearly illuminated face of the dead man.

Gus whirled. ‘Wotsamatter?’ he demanded, grabbing at her arm. ‘Are you all right? Whatever is it?’

‘I —’ She swallowed and shook her head. ‘I know him.’

Even Rupert looked interested now. All the people around her stretched their necks and stared as the sergeant said sharply, ‘Well, that helps. We’ve not been able to get an ID. Not a damn thing on him with a name. Who is he?’

She stared down at the face. It was badly scratched by the gravel; some of the small stones were actually embedded in the gleaming dark skin, mottling it so that it looked as though he had been afflicted with some nameless skin disease. The eyes were half open and the mouth was lax, showing the perfect teeth very clearly. There could be no doubt who he was.

‘He’s one of the doctors at the hospital,’ she said as steadily as she could. ‘Or was. His name is Harilal Rajabani. Harry to most of us.’

By the time George had finished her initial examination and given them permission to move the body to the mortuary at the hospital it was well past midnight. She sat on the low wall at the side of the car park, packing up her gear again. She wasn’t aware of being tired, but she yawned suddenly; and not with sleepiness. It was with stress.

It wasn’t that she’d known Harry all that well, she told herself as she tried to examine the way she felt. He’d been just one of the dozens of junior doctors who could be described as infesting Old East; but that episode in Barrie Ward had made her very aware of him, and she sighed, this time a deeper and more greedy air-gulping movement as she remembered.

It was because she had been so filled with guilt, that was the problem. That man had hurled the most disgusting abuse she had ever heard at Harry Rajabani and no one had done anything to stop him. They had been as paralysed by the venom he had spat as if it had touched them personally, had been frozen into inaction. And then when she’d discovered the man had behaved so out of grief, it had made it worse. His loss didn’t license him to behave appallingly but
it did make it virtually impossible for anyone to deal with him. To go to a man whose young son has just died and take him to task for racism? It couldn’t be done, could it? She couldn’t, in fact, be sure, and she sat on the wall staring into the darkness and tried to get her ideas clear.

Gus had been seeing his men off, checking that the site had been properly sealed from interference and the tarpaulins had been set over the relevant parts of the gravel, and now came crunching towards her. ‘You OK, ducks? Nasty, that one. Sorry you had to do it, seein’ he was a mate.’

‘I’ve told you before, Gus,’ she said wearily as she buckled up her equipment case and slid it into her shoulder bag. ‘He wasn’t a mate. He was a — well, I can’t even call him a colleague.’

‘But you knew him.’

‘How else could I have identified him? Oh, God, there’s a thought. Next of kin. Proper identification.’

‘We’ll worry about that tomorrow.’ He hooked his hand into her elbow and half led, half urged her towards the exit alley, making a wide curve round the place where the tarpaulins lay. They ducked under the yellow plastic ribbons marked, ‘Police. Do Not Enter’, which flapped mournfully in the night wind coming up from the river, and went down to his car. ‘Listen, ducks, this isn’t the time. It’s late, you’re tired. You must be — I’m knackered! But if tomorrow you can think of anything relevant —’

‘Tell me first what you think happened here,’ she said abruptly. The anxiety that was gnawing at her couldn’t be held back much longer, but it might help if she had some facts.

He peered at her and opened his mouth to say one thing, clearly reconsidered and said something else.

‘Well, if you insist, though I’m ready for bed. OK. We think that there was a punch-up of sorts in the pub — well, not to say punch-up. A bit of shouting abuse and insults, pretty normal for the manor. They had a go at this Harry.
He started to shout back but then someone pulled him away and he went off in a state. The abusers, according to the barman, went off after him — trouble is he can’t be sure how long it was between Harry leaving and these other fellas following. We reckon it had to be pretty close, because they caught up with him there. There’s a lavatory by the car park as well as the one inside, which was full of people throwing up, seemingly, at the time all this happened. He must have been going there because he didn’t have a car out here. There were only the staff cars when we got here, as you saw.’

‘I didn’t notice,’ George said.

‘Well, take it from us. No customers’ cars here at all. OK, so these yobs follow him out, duff him up, and — well, we reckon they knocked him down easy enough and then someone ran over him.’

She bit her lip, seeing it clearly in her mind’s eye. ‘More than once, I’d say. Going by the injuries.’

‘Yeah, so you said. Twice forwards, once back, right?’

‘Mmm. It accounts for the way the gravel entered the skin. I have to look in detail in a proper light tomorrow of course, but that was how it looked out here.’

‘And then they drove off. All of ‘em. They could be anyone, anywhere.’ He sounded deeply gloomy. ‘Gettin’ ‘em won’t exactly be easy.’

‘Didn’t anyone in the pub know who they were?’

‘They say not. Tomorrow we’ll get down to it a bit more thoroughly. At least my fellas had the wit to get the names and addresses of everyone in the place and not just in the bar when it happened. They recognized some of the customers of course — it’d be a poor show if they didn’t. I’d want to know the reason why if they couldn’t put a name to most of them. That’s what knowing your community is all about But there were some who were strangers, and we’ll have to chase them. It’s never easy, of course. They look after their own in these parts.’

‘Even if their own are killers?’ George asked bitterly. ‘So much for the good old Cockney warmth and good heart you’re always telling me about.’

‘These people aren’t my sort and never you dare say they are,’ he said sharply and his hand on her elbow tightened. ‘When I said in these parts I wasn’t talking about the ordinary good blokes who live around here, but the bloody publicans. They know which side their lousy beer froths and they don’t take no chances. But you watch me tomorrow. I’ll find out who it was.’

‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ she said slowly and he peered down at her.

‘Now?’

I’ll feel better if I do.’

‘Then let’s have it,’ and again his hand tightened on her arm, but this time it was a warm and protective grip that helped.

‘I’m afraid it might be something — well, listen.’ She told him as briefly as she could what had happened in Barrie Ward on the day Kevin Ritchard died and above all what Harry had said to her that afternoon.

‘When he said it, I paid no attention. It didn’t really mean anything. But then I heard afterwards he’d tried to get hold of me, and then he tried again and I wasn’t available. I meant to get back to him, really I did. I meant to call him this morning but somehow it slipped my mind and —’ She bit her lip again, feeling the tension tighten her throat and knowing that her voice sounded thick and tearful in consequence. ‘I keep remembering what he said to me, and wondering — could it have had anything to do with what happened here tonight?’

He stood very still, clearly thinking, and then shook his head firmly, but to her gratitude, didn’t offer facile reassurance. ‘Listen, there’s no way we can possibly know, is there? It sounds to me, from that story, that this has been another bit of racial aggro. If this bloke — Ritchard? — if Ritchard
comes out of Old East and tells some of his mates that he reckons that this Dr Harry has done for his kid — well.’ He whistled softly on a long intake of breath. ‘Can’t you see the line-up? They get all tanked up, fill themselves with sentimental claptrap about poor dear kids killed by lousy black doctors — I mean, it’s written in stone, ain’t it? Out they go looking for him and when they find him they deal with him in their horrible way. It makes more sense than thinking he was killed because there was something somebody didn’t want you to know, and that he wanted to tell you. What could there be, after all?’

She nodded. ‘I know. I realize that I’ve been telling myself the same thing ever since I got here and recognized him. But the fact remains the idea’s there. And it’s not so easy to get rid of.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘If it’ll help you, want to come with me when I go checking tomorrow? Can you get away?’

She stared at him, startled. ‘How do you mean, come with you? When you go and investigate this, you mean?’

‘If it’ll help. Then you’ll see for yourself the sorts we’re dealing with. It could get nasty — you should see these yobbos when you get them in a corner — but you’re a tough cookie, as they say. And I’ll be there to take care of you. How about it? Then you can see for yourself that you’re not to blame for not finding out what it was this fella wanted to tell you. It was probably just some doctorish thing. I mean, you do have to talk to each other about patients, don’t you?’

‘Of course,’ she said, a little distracted, trying to think it through. ‘I’m not sure —’

‘It won’t be all that dangerous,’ he said. ‘Like I said, I’ll be here to take care of you. And it’s not as though you weren’t a sort of honorary copper, is it? You’re an officer of the court, anyway.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, as if I cared about that,’ she snapped. ‘And I don’t need looking after either. I just wasn’t
sure if I could spare the time. But why not? After I’ve done the PM on Harry, though. That has to come first.’

‘Of course. What time shall I pick you up?’

‘Make it about eleven,’ she said. ‘And Gus?’

He had started to walk round the car to open it. ‘Yeah?’ He looked at her over the top of the car. He was a bit puffy around the eyes and his curly hair badly needed brushing. He had a smear of mud down one side of his face too. He’d never looked, she thought, so, well, so friendly.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Really. Thanks a lot’

14
  
  

The number of people who found reason to call in at the path, lab the following morning after news of Harry’s death was reported on the seven a.m. radio news bulletin was remarkable. Sheila was in a lather of excitement which Jerry, the sardonic senior technician who was her deputy, said was as near as she’d get this year to having a sexual experience, and the rest of the lab staff were agitated as well as excited. ‘To have one of our own doctors killed in a pub brawl,’ Sheila said, ‘is not what you’d expect even at Old East, is it?’