The Operator (Bruce and Bennett Crime Thriller 2) (11 page)

‘So,’ Hassan summed up for Will afterwards. ‘Marie
doesn’t like Tessa. But interestingly doesn’t seem to think she did it. I mean
all her comments on the killer were shall we say, gender specific to men.
Though she might just make the assumption it’s a male crime. Seemed to think
Tessa’s pretty much useless.’

‘Big fan of Mr K isn’t she? Blames the split on
Tessa.’

‘Yeah, anyway, so Tessa knew the contents of his
consulting room very well, but then so did Marie, and anyone she might have
spoken to, and all the patients who consulted him privately. We can get the
uniforms chasing them up. Also Marie has a key of her own. Anyone with access to
her house could have copied it or borrowed it. She swears Kingston kept the
front door locked, unless a patient was due. Before the split, Tessa would have
been there to act as receptionist, nurse and chaperone.’

‘So if the front door was unlocked when Erica
turned up, perhaps the killer left that way and didn’t bother to close it.’

‘We can’t be sure though. Kingston might have
forgotten to lock it for some reason. If robbery was the motive they’d have
just bashed him one and nicked stuff. It does seem a very personal murder.’

Erica powered up and down
the pool, weightless, her lifting arms sweeping the water aside, looking
through the blueness fizzing with the silver bubbles of her breath. While
keeping automatic count of the lengths, instead of playing house music her
thoughts roamed freely.

‘42,43,...so I’m going to the hospital to visit
Mrs O’Rourke. Will I be exploiting her, if I give her some time, and cheer her
up, to get information on Kingston, to help Tessa?

55,56,... might be a bit awkward if I bump into
Rohan... on the other hand, consultants don’t hang about at visiting time, as a
rule. Don’t want to get buttonholed by patients’ rellies. Anyway there’s no
reason why I shouldn’t be there. I’m a fricking tax payer. When I earn enough.

63,64, a mile.’

She relaxed completely, floating on her back. Her
heels drifted down to bump the bottom, her head hung heavy, her eyes shut. As she
breathed, she moved up and down in the water. It was wonderful, like being
unborn.

She might see that young doctor, Jamie Lau. She
imagined enveloping him, as the water enveloped her, tasting him all over,
biting his lower lip... it was definitely time she had a new lover. Not that his
doctor status added to his attractions for her, unlike the women on the covers
of those romance stories who swoon at the sight of a stethoscope and a fat
salary. But she had always had a weakness for a pretty face; beautiful young
men were one indulgence that was both pleasurable and slimming. Win win.

She wondered if he had any interest in traditional
Chinese medicine. It would be interesting to learn more about it, and how he
squared it with the western methods he had sacrificed his sleep and social life
for. Quite a few Chinese medical centres and practitioners in the area these
days, and not just in Newcastle’s Chinatown... Her mind ran on... herbs....
acupuncture...

She breathed in sharply at the wrong time, her
mouth and nose underwater, and was forcibly reminded of her evolutionary status
as she choked and floundered. Acupuncture? Sticking metal needles, spikes even,
into the patient to tap into the energy channels that held the body in balance.
Those spikes that had been driven into Kingston’s head and hands. Could they be
a travesty of, a reference to, acupuncture? Could Kingston have provoked so
much hate in a young colleague? He was certainly in a position to misuse power,
being in a superior position in the hierarchy, and Erica knew how he felt about
alternative medicine. Perhaps he had mocked Jamie or his Chinese culture once
too often.

There seemed no end to the interpretations of
those nails which could point to a motive and a killer.

Of course, Lau had to be a suspect like anyone who
knew or worked with Kingston. She’d assumed it intellectually, had in fact
hoped to increase the number of possible suspects to help Tessa, but now had to
deal with the possibility of Jamie as an individual, and a fit one at that,
actually being guilty. She did a few extra lengths at furious speed while she
faced the fact she’d had been having erotic thoughts about someone who might
have driven nails into someone’s face and hands. She also faced the fact that she
hoped he would not be guilty, for no other reason than that she fancied him. She
was getting out of her depth - the shallows were where she belonged.

She climbed out of the pool, feeling her full
weight hit her as it always did as she returned to exile on dry land, and went off
to wrestle with her snake pit of wet hair.

She was hoping to visit the hospital during the
afternoon visiting times when it would be quieter. The hours were 2.30 to 4.30.
She had time to do some admin for the practice before lunch.

She checked her messages. One from the
Guardian,
passing on a phone number; someone responding to her request in the last ‘You
and Your Health’ page.

What request? For a moment her still water-logged
brain was puzzled. Then she remembered her addition to the obituary, asking for
people to contribute to an article on Kingston.

The caller was a Mrs Hartley, a widow, who gave
her address at once. It was in one of the posher streets of Wydsand, in fact a
street leading from Kingston’s own at right angles down towards the sea front. She
had a forthright voice, pleasant and well-spoken, and said that she had been a
private patient of Mr Kingston.

‘Mr Kingston did a wonderful job, he gave me my
life back when I got my new knees,’ she assured Erica. Yes, well, knee
replacements were hardly cutting edge surgery these days. He could probably do
them in his sleep. And he was well paid for his work, it’s not like he was
doing it out of the goodness of his heart.

‘What did you think of him as a man, a person?’

‘Oh, charming. Attentive, polite, so concerned
that I might feel pain during examinations and so on. A lovely man.’

‘Did you see Mr Kingston at his house?’

‘Yes, he did some consulting there. So I’ve seen
the actual table where...you know...’

‘Did you know his wife?’

‘Not well, you know, but I saw her when I went to
the house. Such a pretty little thing. She used to handle his appointments and
so on. I don’t know what happened between them - the paper said they were
separated. I’d heard she had been ill. But I did know his mother a little
better.’

‘His mother?’

There was an angle Erica hadn’t considered.
Somehow she hadn’t thought of Kingston as having a mother. Had he thought of
her
as ‘hysterical’? She made a note to check on any relatives. Also, those
elusive youths at the sad little drinking den. She must find the time to go
running past there again, at a later time, and see it they had anything to add
to the picture. She wrote MOTHER! YOUTHS! on the pad to remind herself.

‘Oh yes old Mrs Kingston died well over a year
back, as I expect you know,’ Mrs Hartley went on. One possible suspect off the
list. Erica did not disillusion her about the omniscience of the local press.

‘She was so proud of him. It was, ‘my son, the surgeon’,
all the time. She lived next door to Mr Kingston.’

‘Next door?’ A bit strange – a smothered mother’s
boy? Was his apparent misogyny displaced rage against a mother he couldn’t
leave?

 ‘He was so good to her. Bought her the house when
she became infirm, so he could be sure she was cared for.’ Ah. Norman Bates off
the list then. ‘Another gentleman lives there now, a keen golfer.’

‘I think I’ve met him.’ Erica thought of the gent
in the golf sweater, Archer, Harold Archer, she’d met out running. It would be
a big house, expensive, for a man on his own. But he might think it well worth
it to be so near his Golf Club.

‘Well, you won’t hear a word against Mr Kingston
from anyone around here,’ asserted Mrs Hartley, in her double role of patient
and neighbour.

Realistically, his private patients would be
almost bound to sing his praises. He would hardly have showed any dark side of
his character to a paying customer. Or a well-off neighbour either. Investing
in another house next to his own, supposing he’d kept it in his own name, was a
shrewd financial move, as a glance at the
Guardian
estate agents’ ad
pages for that area of the coast showed, recession or not. And besides, even if
he’d given his mother the house outright, she’d died so he’d have scooped the
dosh in any case. Erica felt suddenly guilty about her own stereotyped thinking
when she’d heard about his being a good son. Why shouldn’t Kingston be good to
his mother? Why not have her living next door? It’s not like he’d never left
home. If it seemed a contradiction beside his abusive behaviour as a husband,
well even the Kray twins were good to their old mum - and besides, a small
voice in her head murmured, you only have Tessa’s word for the abuse. She
quashed it at once, determined to believe her protégé, but it managed another
small gasp before being ruthlessly suffocated. After all, she lied to you about
her identity... No, she lied to protect herself against an abusive man. She was
taking a terrible risk just going to Erica at all.

‘Ye’s lot are fkn mentalists.’
Thus Scotty, a feral youth with the skinny, round-shouldered posture and muddy,
spotty complexion of a couple of generations of mums going to Iceland, but not
to harpoon their own walrus. ‘It’s fkn prejudice that’s what it is. Ye’re oot
to get iz. Like ye got wor Kyle.’

‘Aye,’ added his mother. ‘Aa’ve lost one of me
sons to ye’s lot, isn’t tharr enough for ye’s?’

Will looked at his files as if checking, though he
remembered the family well. ‘Lost’ as in ‘sent down for nth offence’. ‘Ah yes, Kyle.
TWOCKING wasn’t it? He certainly made a spirited attempt to outrun us if I
remember rightly. His last joyride cost us a police car.’

Mother and son high-fived in celebration of Kyle’s
achievement, but she registered belated outrage as her hand hit Scotty’s.

‘Joyridin? Fkn joyridin’? Ee, of aal the nerve! My
Kyle’s no joyrider. He’s a professional thief, man!’

‘I do apologise,’ Will said dryly.

‘And that bizzy was a shite driver, or he’d not’ve
hit that bollard,’ Scotty was quick to contribute.

‘Either way,’ Hassan ploughed on, ‘this is about
you Scotty lad, not your brother. You are underage and have been caught in
possession of alcohol before...’

‘Give ower, man, worram Aa supposed to dee? There’s
nowt for us kids, man, we just hang oot together and we get porsecuted by ye’s
lot... Everybody drinks, man!’

‘Be that as it may,’ Will took over. ‘You have
previous on this, and now we find your old familiar fingerprints on a vodka
bottle, dumped in a snicket...’

‘Aa’ve nivvor been anywhere near one of them!’
Scotty was as definite about this as he was unsure what a snicket was.

‘Leave the bairn be!’ his mother insisted. ‘Aa
gave the lad that voddie bottle...’

‘Which is an offence,’ put in Hassan, too soon.

‘And it was empty when Aa give it him. Aa asked
him to put it in the recycling like, burree must’ve forgot.’ She sat back and
grinned at the officers.

‘Aye, she did and aal,’ Scotty jumped on board. ‘Aa
must’ve dropped the bugger somewhere. Aa’m SO sorry for droppin litter, and that.
Now can Aa gan hyem?’

Hassan and Will exchanged looks. This had been a
very very long shot and didn’t look like getting them anywhere. Families like
Scotty’s grew up learning to talk this kind of language. Oh well.

‘The thing is,’ Will tried anyway. ‘The vodka
bottle with YOUR fingerprints on it was dropped at the scene of a murder.’

Scotty’s mum sat up. ‘Now hey! Divven’t ye try to
pin that Kingston killing on my lad.’

‘How do you know I mean that one?’

She was too smart for that. ‘What, there’ve been
other morders roond heor lately? Anyway my lad did nowt. He was home with me on
the neet in question, aal neet. Yer cannit prove that bottle was dropped that
neet, I’m bettin.’

‘Erm naw, I think it was the neet afore Aa must’ve
dropped it alang by his hoose.’ Scotty took his cue.

‘Look Scotty, I’m going to level with you. I don’t
think you had anything to do with the murder. But one of your mates might have.’

‘Aa’m not grassin on me mates.’

‘Or one of you might’ve seen something.’

‘We - Aa nivvor.’

‘Or someone.’

‘Na. Them posh bastards alang there, always tellin
we to piss off, when we’re deeing nee harm. Just sittin, talkin, on wor phones,
listnin to music, ye knaa. We’ve got neewhere to go man! Erm, except that neet
like. When Aa wasn’t there.’

‘Reet, the bairn’s told ye’s. Now leave him alone.
We’re goin.’

‘There’ve been reports of vandalism along there by
the golf course. Some people have had windows broken, greenhouses, garden
ornaments damaged. By golf balls at night. That wouldn’t have been you would it?’

‘Eee, somebody’s had their garden gnome busted? Eee,
that’s terrible officer! Not me. Golf baals? Ower posh for us like. More likely
some owld geezer playin at neet.’

‘Well if you think of anything, or you saw
anything, let us know. And spread the word among your mates.’ Will closed the
file as mother led Scotty away in triumph. ‘Epic fail.’.

‘Yes, but you know. Let her have her win. She has
a pretty crap life.’

‘You’re an old softie Hassan. But they did make a
good double act. And I can’t really believe the lads did have anything to do
with the killing.’

‘And it did seem that litter’d been there a night
or so already. Judging by the state of the paper labels and fag packets.’

Kev put his head round the door. ‘Found some drugs
on that lad Scotty. Stupid git was trying to sell them to a youth waiting at
the desk. Boasting he’s a murder suspect! He’ll dine out, or drink out, on that
for months. Here you are Guv.’ He handed Will an opened small brown paper
packet. ‘Says he’s on a diet and they’re sweeteners!’