The Burden of Doubt (13 page)

The door was pulled open to reveal a sleepy looking man with a thatch of foppishly cut hair the colour of conkers. Swift could see where the attraction would be for women, especially young ones. Guest’s face had breathtakingly regular features, cheekbones with razor sharp definition and blue eyes framed with luxuriant lashes perfectly matching the hair on his head. ‘I’m Naomi Swift’s father,’ he said, stepping forward into the entrance hall and forcing Guest to step back.

‘OK, OK!’ Guest put up his hands in surrender. ‘I can see you’ll be none too happy with what’s been going on.’

‘You could say that. But I’m not here to do the heavy father bit. Naomi’s an adult – at least in the eyes of the law. But I think you need to do some talking.’

As Guest nodded his forelock fell over his eyes. He pushed it back. ‘Fair enough. Come through and sit down.’

Swift sat down on a black leather sofa and looked around. Guest had a stereo system and CD stack, almost identical to
Craven’s. But there the resemblance ended. Guest’s room was stylish, warm and instantly welcoming. A place you felt you’d be happy to spend time in. One entire wall was lined with books, neatly stacked on pine shelves. There was an assortment of casual chairs; 1930s Lloyd Loom and big squashy armchairs chairs covered in faded brocade as though they had just been pulled out of someone’s great grandmother’s parlour. A goldfish bowl filled with daffodils stood on a round walnut table.

Swift pictured Naomi curled in one of the chairs, reading. Maybe listening to music or just dreaming. Or naked, making love with Jasper Guest.

‘Is she here?’ he asked Guest.

‘No.’ There was a moment of indecision in his eyes. ‘She’s coming over later in the morning.’

‘Just think of me as an arm of the police,’ Swift told him. ‘Reviewing your previous form.’

Guest sank down in one of the armchairs. ‘Fair enough. I’d want to know the same if it was my kid. I got into trading a bit of dope when I was at Oxford. I might look as if I was born with a silver spoon lodged in my gullet, but my father made his living from being a vicar and we were pretty poor. Trading gave me a bit of spare cash to keep up with the Eton set.’

‘And you got caught?’

‘I pinched someone’s girl. He shopped me. Again, fair enough.’ Guest’s rueful smile would have charmed birds from the trees.

‘Charged?’

‘For possession of a small amount of cannabis resin. It wouldn’t count for much now, would it? No one in the drugs squad would be getting excited. Even back then I only got a suspended sentence.’

‘OK. And then there was some trouble before you left Oxford?’

‘God! That. There was a demonstration just before graduation. Some fascist anti-abortion Jesus followers making their point in a college debate. I wasn’t the only one who got a few thumps and gave some back.’

‘But you got yourself apprehended?’

‘Yep. A telling off and two months’ probation. My poor pa wasn’t best pleased.’

‘You don’t have a lot of success in keeping a low profile, do you?’ Swift commented evenly.

‘’Fraid not.’

Swift could see Guest was a martyr to his spectacular charm and looks. There was something about the man he liked. But maybe not as a charmer with Naomi on the receiving end of his allure.

‘And the three grams of cocaine in your car? Was that simply for personal use? I can’t bring myself to believe that.’

‘It wasn’t mine.’

‘And it wasn’t Naomi’s,’ Swift said firmly, a statement not a question.

‘Good God, no!’

‘So, how come it was in your car?’

‘It was planted.’

‘By yet another of your enemies?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes, I suspect it was.’

There was a long pause. Swift ran through a likely scenario. Guest running up against Craven and his colleagues. Getting himself well on the wrong side of them. Getting them well on his trail. Goading Craven who didn’t seem a man much troubled by moral integrity.

‘Have you any evidence for this possible plant?’ he asked.

‘As a matter of fact, I do. One of the locks on my car was tampered with the night before last while Naomi and I were out eating with friends. I drive a 1989 Alfetta. Its security is somewhat primitive, no alarm, no immobilizer. It’s an easy target.’

‘Would Naomi be able to confirm this?’

‘Yep. Just ask her.’ Another rueful smile. Another toss of the conker-coloured forelock. The man oozed sex appeal. Swift could see why Naomi was hooked. From experience of his own and observation of many others, Swift knew that sexual infatuation was like influenza, it got you in its grip and you just had to wait until the fever died down and your immune system worked the bugs out of your bloodstream. And maybe it would never happen. Whatever, he couldn’t do much about it.

He got up.

Guest shot to his feet. ‘I’m really sorry that Naomi’s been pulled into the this mess of mine.’

‘Fair enough,’ Swift said, feeling this was a phrase Guest could connect with. ‘Just make sure she doesn’t get into this sort of mess through you again.’ He moved out into the hallway. Guest went ahead and opened the door. ‘I’m no hawk,’ Swift told him, ‘but if there’s any hint of trouble I’ll be back up here in a flash. And you won’t like it.’

Guest nodded acceptance. He extended his hand. Swift took it. Then got into his car and set off on the drive back to Yorkshire. It struck him that, on balance, he had probably not succeeded in avoiding the playing the heavy father role.

Fair enough.

On the north side of Bradford that same morning the weather was becoming grey and cloudy once again, the sky filling up with further snow which had driven in from the west. Straight from the Arctic as far as Shaun Busfield was concerned. The heating in his gran’s house had gone on the blink and the place was like a morgue. Damned under-floor heating which he couldn’t get at to see what was what. He’d fiddled with the fuse box, but being no electrician had merely succeeded in fusing the whole blasted shebang. So now he had no heat, no light, and no way to heat up any of the endless cans of beans in the cupboard.

Stomping through to the main bedroom he rifled through his gran’s wardrobe and found an ancient fur coat, swaddled in plastic and reeking of mothballs. The sleeves only came down to just below his elbows but the rest of the old girl’s coat did the trick as far as getting a bit of warmth back into his frozen body was concerned.

Returning to the living-room he aimed the remote at the TV, forgetting for a moment that that too wasn’t going to work. Frustration rolled through him. He swore and kicked out at the dainty little table on which his gran had kept her knick-knacks. A china shepherdess fell on to the hearth and shattered into fragments. Tear of rage and helplessness stood in his eyes. He went through into the tiny garage annexed on to the kitchen. His gran had never had a car so the space had been used to store garden furniture used in the summer and bits and pieces of old furniture
and scraps of carpet that might come in handy. He remembered there was a cupboard where she kept a torch and light bulbs. Maybe there’d be some spare fuses he could use to get things started up again.

Looking in the cupboard he found nothing of much help. He closed the cupboard door and laid his head against it. His heart began to speed up as he considered the desperate nature of his situation. How long could he go on hiding like this? It was a question which he had kept trying to bury over the past few days, but this morning it wouldn’t go away.

Straightening up, he noticed a box pushed against the wall beneath the cupboard. It had a Christmassy label on it saying it was from Jim and Pat with love. He vaguely remembered some well-to-do cousin who’d gone on sending his gran stuff at Christmas. Opening the box he found twelve bottles of wine inside. Six white, six red. Posh expensive stuff as far as he could judge by the labels. He grinned. Jim and Pat had wasted their cash, his gran never touched wine, just the odd glass of sweet sherry or Babycham on special occasions. Well, at least he could have a drink to cheer himself up.

He pulled the bottles out of their cardboard housings and lined them up on the garage floor. As he bent to grasp the final two bottles he noticed that that the box itself was stacked on a long parcel wrapped in brown paper. He shifted the box and looked more closely. Then tore off the wrapping paper. Inside was the money he’d always been sure his gran would have stored up like a busy anxious squirrel. Sweat prickled under his armpits as he began to count the ten pound notes. Minutes passed. He paused to unscrew a bottle of white and take a long swig. And then he went on counting. And on. A smile spread over his increasingly flushed face and fixed itself there. He’d found himself a bloody little fortune.

Going back through to the living-room, he pranced about for a time, singing and swigging. The room became darker and darker as the snow began to fall. He risked parting the curtains a fraction. The snow was driving down as though the clouds had detonated it. Euphoria seized him. He was rich. Rich people could do
anything they liked, couldn’t they? Although, even so, he couldn’t quite think what he might do to get himself out of the mess he was in, how to free himself from the prison of his gran’s prissy bungalow. His head was beginning to swim. He’d think things out when he was sober. For now he’d just enjoy getting totally plastered.

‘Did things go OK, boss?’ Laura asked with concern as Swift walked into the incident room. ‘With your daughter?’

‘As good as could be expected.’ He didn’t want to talk about it. ‘What about here? Anything new?’ It felt as though he had been away for weeks.

‘Not really. Busfield’s still safe in whatever bolthole he’s hiding in. The super’s not looking one bit happy, and Doug’s talking to Tina, yet again.’

‘Someone must know where Busfield is. Even if they’re not aware they know,’ Swift said. ‘Get out all the transcripts we’ve got concerning him and we’ll go through them again.’

Over freshly brewed coffee they went through the transcripts ringing round names of every contact they’d spoken to with regard to Busfield.

‘Problem is,’ Laura said, ‘they all gave the impression he wasn’t one to chat much about friends and family.’

‘There’s the grandmother,’ Swift said slowly, noting the comment made by one of Busfield’s friends. ‘She died recently and he was upset.’

‘So did she live alone?’ Laura mused. ‘Did she own her own house? And if so, is it somewhere Busfield could use as a safe place?’

Swift frowned in self-reproach. Why hadn’t they thought of that before? Why hadn’t
he
thought of it? He was the one who had the overview. ‘I suppose we were pretty sure we’d get a bite when we put out a general alert for him,’ Swift said evenly, not one to cry over spilt milk. ‘And in these cases we usually do fairly soon.’

‘We don’t have a name. But Tina’ll know,’ Laura said, keen to put her shoulder firmly to this particular wheel.

‘Yes. But if the grandmother is the key to where Busfield is, will she tell us?’ Swift said. ‘From what we currently know of Tina she’s showing a lot of determination to keep what she knows to herself.’

‘She either loves him to bits,’ Laura reflected, ‘and wants to shield him at any cost, or she’s scared out of her wits he’ll somehow get his revenge if she rats on him.’

‘Agreed,’ Swift said. ‘But Doug can be very persuasive.’

Laura smiled. ‘He’s a dark horse, our Doug. Hidden depths.’

‘Did you follow up with the neighbour Tricklebank mentioned, as regards Cavanagh?’ Swift asked.

Laura’s eyes widened in mock horror. ‘We’ve been working directly to the super’s directions. Nose firmly to the grindstone on finding Busfield.’

‘Why not have a short break?’ Swift suggested.

After she had left, he sat in thought. And then reached for his phone and dialled Cat’s number.

Laura parked her cherished old Mini in the driveway of a neat detached house with a blue slate roof and rows of windows in a cross-hatch of small rectangles. She guessed the window cleaner must sigh each time he embarked on them with his soap and leather.

The front door was immaculately painted in blue and the thickness of the paint had an oily gleam to it. She entertained herself with a little fantasy of a maid opening the door, the frilly-cap-and-apron sort of maid who appeared in period TV dramas. She supposed in the twenty-first century any servant available would be from Estonia or the Philippines. In fact the lady of the house answered in person. She was dressed in pale-blue jeans and a thick granite-coloured wool sweater.

‘Mrs Juliet Cox? I’m Detective Constable Laura Ferguson. I’m involved in the investigation into the murder of Moira Farrell.’

Juliet Cox nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve been following it on the news.’

‘I believe Mr Tricklebank might have told you I’d be calling. He gave me your address.’

Juliet Cox gestured Laura to come inside and led the way
through a thickly carpeted hallway into a long living-room at the rear of the house. ‘Sit down,’ she said, ‘I’ll get the coffee. It’s all ready.’ She went away leaving Laura to look around and observe the gleaming, polished French windows which led into a hexagonal-shaped conservatory whose roof was rapidly becoming a collecting point for the snow which was still driving down hard. The living-room was faultlessly tidy, carpeted in the same thick pile as the hallway, with Chinese rugs scattered about as a luxurious extra. The fireplace was filled with an artistic arrangement of winter greenery. Portraits of teenage children stood on an oval glass table at the side of the room. The whole place was warm as toast with heat pulsing from somewhere Laura couldn’t manage to identify.

‘Do you like black or white?’ Juliet Cox said returning with a tray.

Laura asked for white, and accepted one of the chocolate biscuits Juliet Cox offered. ‘Mrs Cox, we gather that you were recently treated by one Mr Cavanagh at the District Hospital—’

‘He actually did my surgery at the Willsdale Clinic,’ Juliet Cox interrupted. ‘My husband’s firm provides a private health package for us all. Not that it makes any difference, he’s just as useless wherever he’s operating: private or national health.’ She looked hard at Laura. ‘Is he a suspect? For Dr Farrell’s?’

‘We’re simply gathering any relevant information,’ Laura said carefully.

‘Well,’ Juliet Cox commented tartly, ‘whether he killed that poor woman or not, he’s certainly a butcher, and I’m only too pleased to talk about my experiences at the hands of Adrian Cavanagh. The sooner he gets a stop put on his antics the better.’ She took a sip of coffee and put her cup down. ‘Fourteen months ago I had a routine prolapse repair.’

Laura felt slightly uneasy. Middle-aged gynaecological problems always sounded messy, worrying and ultimately depressing when you considered where, as a young woman, you were heading.

Juliet Cox gave the faintest of smiles. ‘You only get a vaginal wall prolapse if you have a baby and you’re not too posh to push. The choice is yours.’

‘All pain and no gain,’ said Laura, aiming for a light tone, although internally she was wincing, reflecting on her own situation – the constant nagging fear that she could be pregnant, and what she would do if it turned out to be so. She’d bought a testing kit, but it was too early yet for it to give reliable results.

Juliet Cox offered Laura a second biscuit which she declined. ‘The first operation seemed to go all right. Until the second day. I started having quite a lot of bleeding. The sister who was in charge of my case rang Cavanagh, but he said not to worry, to make sure I had bed rest and he’d be in to see me the next day.’ She toyed with a chocolate biscuit then put it back on the plate. ‘I did just wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that it was a Sunday and he had jolly social things planned with his family. However, being at that point still quite a nice reasonable woman, I put up with the bleeding and the pain and waited until Monday. He came along said he didn’t want to give me a proper examination as it could disturb the stitches. He said some bleeding and discomfort was quite normal at this stage and he prescribed painkillers to make me more comfortable, as he put it. In the night they had to get him in to see me again, as I’d passed out through loss of blood. The nursing staff set up a transfusion and the next day I went back to theatre to have some further repair work done.’

Laura put down her chocolate biscuit and began to scribble furiously in her notebook.

‘Subsequent to that I had two further ops before I could go home. And, somehow, although he talked to me very sweetly he never really told me what the problem was. And whatever it was it was certainly not his fault. Sometimes I even got the impression it was somehow my fault, which I suppose it was partly, because by this time I’d become quite emotional and demanding. I was desperate to get better, desperate to find out what was going on. I asked him if I had cancer, but he said no. But I felt dreadful and I was still in pain and losing quite a lot of blood. Every time my husband came to visit I burst into tears, and generally I was in a mess, both literally and personally. It got to the point where the insurance company wouldn’t pay for any more treatment and I was presented with a huge bill from the clinic for the cost of the
stay. And all the time Cavanagh was as nice as pie and constantly protesting that everything was going fine.’

She put down her cup. Suddenly her eyes filled with tears and she was unable to continue. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Just give me a minute. I want you to know the whole story.’

Laura waited patiently. She looked at the chocolate biscuits left on the plate and found they were no longer tempting.

Juliet Cox swallowed, blew her nose and mopped the skin beneath her eyes. ‘In a nutshell,’ she said, her voice husky from crying, ‘I eventually went to see another consultant gynaecologist in Leeds and had two further operations in an attempt to put my insides in order.’

‘Did he tell you what the problem had been?’

‘It was a her. And she didn’t tell me anything directly. Medics don’t grass on each other, I’ve learned that. They stick together like glue. But from what she said about the number of stitches she had to put in my insides it was obvious Cavanagh had made a complete bungle of the surgery he performed.’ Her eyes rested on Laura then slid away to the floor.

‘I was in a real state by then. I had to have psychotherapy and take anti-depressants. I couldn’t do my job. I’ve worked for twenty years as a manager in the children and family section at social services, but you have to be right up to the mark and feeling fit and well both physically and psychologically for that kind of work. I had six months off and then, in the end, I applied for early retirement on health grounds. And I’m still on anti-depressants. If I didn’t take them I don’t think I’d get through the day.’ She was fidgeting with the ends of the silk scarf around her neck, her composure steadily breaking down. ‘And I’m bitter and paranoid and hell to live with. My husband’s soldiering on, but only with the help of a little affair on the side with one of his work colleagues.’

‘Why did you want to spend time telling me this?’ Laura asked, fascinated by Juliet’s story, but beginning to feel uneasy about the time she was spending gaining information on a personal disaster which seemed unlikely to be related to Moira Farrell’s murder.

‘I want Cavanagh stopped. I want to make sure he doesn’t
work again as a surgeon. Not out of revenge, just out of consideration of all those women he could damage in the future. He’s dealing with pregnant women, with the deliveries of little babies, for God’s sake. It’s not as if he’s a novice just starting out: everybody makes mistakes – but he doesn’t learn from them. And that means he’s a fuckwit – and yet he keeps his job!’ After this outburst Juliet Cox’s face was flushed with angry resentment and frustration.