Second Opinion (30 page)

More by luck than judgement they were apart when Bridget came in again, this time bearing a plateful of home-baked biscuits on to which she had piled turkey liver pâté, and she seemed oblivious to George’s red cheeks and Gus’s air of self-satisfaction.

‘Don’t eat too many,’ she instructed. ‘Vanny’ll just about kill me if you lose your appetite for her turkey and all the fixin’s. Not long now. Do we open the presents before lunch or after?’

‘Uh — I don’t mind.’ George was flustered and trying hard to hide it. ‘Whatever everyone else wants to do.’

Gus looked across at the tree, beneath which there were now more parcels than ever, and grinned. ‘Leave ‘em till after lunch. There’s nothing so exciting as making people wait for what they most want.’ He threw a wicked leer at George which made her snort with laughter. Bridget beamed and nodded.

‘Just what I always think. OK, then. The great blowout starts in fifteen minutes!’

Lunch was long and excessive and punctuated by much cracker-pulling, greatly to Vanny and Bridget’s amusement.

‘We only have these for children’s birthday parties,’ Bridget confided to Gus. ‘It was real sweet of you to bring them. And such fancy ones!’

‘I like to be common,’ Gus said happily. ‘The more gold paper and frou-frous the better. Hey, listen to this!’ He had unwrapped his motto, and was sitting there, his head crowned with a confection of pink and blue paper that made him look like a drunken cherub now. ‘Tell me what it means, someone! “Confucius he say, ‘Man who steals kisses is not thief when lady helps him to help himself.’”‘

George threw him a knife-sharp glare and said, ‘That sounds more like a prawn cracker motto than a Christmas cracker one,’ which was a feeble sally but the best she could
manage. Fortunately both Vanny and Bridget had had enough of the excellent champagne, which Gus had also brought, to fuddle them and make them think this exchange was exquisitely funny, so they laughed immoderately and began to fuss over providing second helpings.

The rest of the afternoon was as agreeable as lunch had been. They washed up in a noisy huddle, then shared out their gifts from the tree and adored each other’s choices. Gus had given George a large one-volume history of London which he had had bound in crimson leather and engraved with her name in gilt, a beautiful thing that made her blush for what she now perceived as the banality of her own gift — a pair of leather gloves — but which seemed to please him greatly. And then they settled to the somnolence of an afternoon in which the television murmured softly in the background while the old ladies slept away their natural fatigue after all their efforts and Gus and George talked in a desultory fashion.

Always afterwards she was to remember that afternoon as the turning point in her dealings with Gus. They had started on the wrong foot, right at the beginning, when she was new at Old East and faced with the Oxford case. There had been a confusion of identity that had made her pugnacious in her dealings with him thereafter. They had reached a sort of friendship as the months had gone on and they had worked together over several other cases; but this afternoon — this afternoon was different.

It made them true friends, she realized, the sort who could sit and be comfortable together without actually talking all the time; the sort who could pick up the other’s thoughts and join in an elliptical conversation with immediate understanding of what the other meant. It was deeply comfortable and soothing and at the same time exciting, for the friendship carried, as they both now well knew, the promise of something more. Much more.

The afternoon light had dwindled to indigo, until the room was lit only by the flicker of the flames in the grate and the shifting colours of the TV screen, when Vanny woke — or seemed to wake — stared widely at George and sang in her high little voice, ‘“I’m off with the raggle-taggle gypsies, oh!”‘ and immediately fell asleep again. Which made both George and Gus giggle; and then both realized at the same time that she hadn’t behaved as oddly as they first thought, for the TV was now showing a resumé of the past decade, and at the point Vanny had woken had been showing scenes of deprivation and distress among the children of Bucharest. Especially gypsy children.

‘… these children,’ the voiceover intoned, ‘are paying the horrendous price for the ambitions of the dictator Ceausescu. Thrown into orphanages to rot, with gypsy children making a high proportion of the numbers, they rock themselves interminably in an effort to get some of the stimulation and comfort they fail to find in the arms of loving parents or carers, their only hope the possibility of people coming from the West — mostly America — willing and able to adopt them.’

‘That’s what reminded her of the song,’ Gus said quietly, but George shook her head.

‘She’s been singing it ever since she first heard it at the Players that night,’ she whispered, not wanting to wake Vanny again. There was no risk of waking Bridget, who was snoring happily, well away. ‘It was just one of those —’

She stopped suddenly and stared at him and then shook her head. The notion that had slipped into it was absurd. The result of too much food and drink and sleepiness. She was fantasizing. She was melodramatic. And yet —

Gus had opened his mouth to speak but she shook her head at him and returned her attention to the TV set, having to strain just a little to hear the commentary, for they had kept the sound turned low deliberately. The screen now showed scenes of street-fighting in Romania,
and she watched eagerly; but then the commentary shifted and moved on to another story. The Gulf War this time. Again she pushed away the absurd notion that had come into her mind. It
was
absurd, too absurd even to consider, wasn’t it?

Gus was watching her curiously. Then he said quietly, ‘You’ve just had the mother and father of a hunch.’

‘Hmm?’

‘So what was it? Won’t you share it?’

She was still lost in her own thoughts and he said again, a little more loudly, ‘May I know what it is?’

Now she looked at him and her slightly glazed expression cleared and sharpened. ‘Uh — know what?’

‘I said, you just had a sudden idea, right? It walked all over your face like a kid in a field of new snow. The footprints went very deep, lady. So let me share, hmm?’

She stared at him and then bit her lip, torn. He looked back at her, his head cocked. For a moment, she wanted to pour it all out, to build on the afternoon’s intimacy, to be really close. But then she caught her breath. Suppose she was wrong? Suppose it was a mad notion born out of a punch and champagne-fuddled imagination? She couldn’t bear to display herself in a bad light to him; she really couldn’t. And as she thought it, she drew back and some of the warmth faded from his eyes as he saw her do it.

‘Not — there’s nothing to share,’ she said lamely.

‘Rotten liar.’ He sounded amiable and light-hearted but she wasn’t fooled. She’d hurt his feelings and she leaned forward impulsively from her corner of the couch to put her hand on his shoulder; he was sitting on the hearth rug at her feet and it was easy.

‘Yes, you’re right. I did have a sudden notion. But it’s so — well, ephemeral. Silly really. I’d rather do some checking before I make a fool of myself.’

He twisted round and looked up at her, his face almost as close as it had been when he’d kissed her. ‘You’re a soppy
ha’porth, you know that? There’s nothing you could do that would ever make a fool of you in my eyes. I thought we was proper mates. Shared things.’

‘Yes …’ she said, but drew back again, wanting to respond to him and yet aware of the deep stubborn streak that had always been her downfall exerting its pressure. ‘I will share it. But just let me check something first. I know I don’t have to with you, but, Gus, let me be what I am, for God’s sake. Don’t try and make me different. I’m stubborn, OK? I like to make sure of my facts before I go and — well, usually I like to make sure,’ she amended, then grinned. ‘I’ve learned to listen to myself, that’s the thing. I’ve gone in half-cocked too often in the past and made a — what is it you call it? A right royal cock-up. Give me a day or two, that’s all. Then when I’ve found out if I’m even half right, I promise I’ll tell you. But if I’m making a fool of myself, well at least I won’t have to let you know it. Fair enough?’

He looked at her for a long moment and at last nodded. ‘If that’s what you want, ducks. Do it your way. It’s not that I want to make you do anything. I’m not that sort, take it from me. You’ll find out I’m not. I just like to feel trusted, that there’s nothing hidden between me and my friends, know what I mean? It’s not nosiness. It’s just — just sharing.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘And I promise you I’ll tell you when I’ve found out a bit more. Please don’t take it personally — me needing to do that, I mean.’

‘No,’ he said, and turned back to stare at the TV screen which was now full of images of a beauty contest as the report raced on, ten years of hectic living being packed into half an hour of their time. ‘No. I won’t take it personally.’

But she knew he had.

22
  
  

In a hospital the days after Christmas are dispiriting. The decorations that looked so brave and promising before Christmas Eve are tarnished and tawdry by the day after Boxing Day, and the general air of untidiness upsets the staff — notably the senior nursing staff — more than a little, so they bustle and snap a good deal as they try to get straight again, while at the same time bracing themselves for the flood of new admissions that are always a feature of the post-Christmas return to normality.

This Christmas was the same as all previous Christmases and George found the laboratory an unhappy place to be when she went back to work after the break. Jerry was off sick — ‘The usual hangover, he only gets rid of it in time for a New Year booze-up so he can be off the first week in January as well, the lazy bastard,’ Sheila said sourly, and set to work grimly to scrub her department clear of any hint of tinsel and tralala and to drive the rest of the staff mad while she did it. No one was more eager for Christmas the week before 25 December nor so waspish about it the week after than Sheila.

George for her part tucked herself away in her office and, grateful that the day hadn’t produced the rash of bodies she had half expected as people succumbed to too much festive jollification, set about preparing her year’s
end statistics for the Board. Not that she had to do a lot — most of the actual work could be carried out on Sheila’s computer — but still there were documents to be sorted and totals to be collated ready to be fed into the system. That took her all morning.

At lunchtime, however, she felt reasonably free of Old East work and could turn her attention back to the two deaths Gus was investigating. The first thing she did was to pull out the Chowdary file which she had kept hidden in her top drawer. She’d have to give the notes back soon; someone surely would notice they were missing from the Registry and Cherry, she knew, was too concerned about Harry’s posthumous reputation to let them stay with her for much longer; and anyway she’d promised their swift return. She had to sort it out now, or lose the chance.

She read with great care the PM report made by her locum. It wasn’t precisely the sort she’d have written herself, of course; whenever did any doctor think a locum’s work good enough? But it wasn’t all that bad. He had clearly been a careful man and one given to paying due attention to details.

And he had made no mention anywhere of a strawberry naevus on the body of the Chowdary baby although he’d described every other aspect of the surface appearance minutely. Surely,
surely
, had there been one, he would have noted it? Minor blemishes though such naevi were, usually fading before a child was three, it had been there, and he should have mentioned it. Perhaps she could track him down, see if he remembered? Where was he working now? She looked at the name at the end of the report; James Browne. No address and a common name. She’d have to make enquiries and that could take time — unless she could get evidence from elsewhere of course.

She made up her mind what to do quite suddenly. She went into the lab to give Sheila all the material ready for the computer work she would have to do, and escaped to
make her way over to Cherry’s little cubby hole of an office in Fertility. Please let her be at work this morning, she prayed in a vague unfocused fashion. Don’t let me waste more time. The sooner I can tell Gus what my idea is, the better. I don’t want him thinking I’m being remote and cool, when it’s the last thing I feel. But that was not a subject she could think about right now. So she refused to. It was not easy, however.

Happily for her peace of mind, Cherry was at work, sitting drooping at her desk and chewing the end of a pencil as she stared at the shabby almost-dead calendar on her wall.

She greeted George in a lacklustre fashion, but cheered up a little when she saw the Chowdary notes that George put down on the desk in front of her.

‘Oh, I’m glad to see them,’ she said. ‘I was just wondering when you’d fetch them back. I mean, I know you promised, but you know how it is. People forget. I’ve really got to put them back in the Matty files. They’ll come complaining about how untidy Harry was if I don’t and I don’t want that.’