A Bleeding of Innocents Page 12

  ‘And where does Jack Carney fit into it?’

  Donovan shot her a hunted look. ‘He does, I know he does; I just don’t know how. Neither the anaesthetist nor the nurse saw anything wrong when Board was working on Alan, they’d have said if they had. But if she didn’t know Carney, why did he kill her? Or if he didn’t, who did? There’s something going on at that hospital. I just don’t believe in a serial killer who could see well enough to distinguish Kerry Page from her husband in a car on a dark night but thought Maggie Board was a nurse. And if he went to the trouble of following the Pages to a country car park late at night, why was he so casual about his second victim that he shot her in the middle of town in broad daylight?’

  It was a valid point. The trouble with Donovan, Liz was discovering, was that most of his points were valid: it was his conclusions that had to be treated with caution.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘So we’ve three possibilities: that these murders are the work of a psychopath with a nurse fetish, that Carney’s behind them, or they’re connected with whatever split that surgical team four years ago. Who’s the killer, then?’

  ‘Depends what happened and who it happened to.’

  ‘Yes, quite. But someone who – what, considered himself their victim? Someone whose operation was bungled?’

  Donovan’s eyebrows were sceptical. ‘I’ve heard of sleeping on a decision but not for four years.’

  Liz agreed. ‘It doesn’t sound too likely, does it? Unless for some reason this was his first chance. Could he have been in hospital till now?’

  ‘Four years is a long time to be laid up. I don’t think most people leaving hospital after four years would be fit to commit two murders.’

  Liz nodded slowly. ‘So who else would want to kill an entire surgical team?’

  ‘Next of kin? If he’s been looking after the victim, maybe he was too busy to do anything till now.’

  Liz continued the thought almost seamlessly. ‘If he cared enough about that person to kill those he blamed, he couldn’t do anything that might result in him being put away while he was still needed. Suppose what changed after four years was that he wasn’t needed any longer: his dependent either went into residential care or died. So our man was free to do what he’d been itching to do for four years.’

  Donovan was watching her with genuine respect. ‘That could work. How do we find out?’

  ‘You go see Dr Saunders,’ decided Liz. ‘Forget what I said about not bullying people: bully him as much as you like but find out what happened in the theatre that made those three people split up. And ask him why he was seeing Kerry Page.’

  The Sergeant looked surprised. ‘Do we know he was?’

  ‘She was seeing a doctor, not professionally. If it was Saunders it must be something to do with this.’

  ‘Could she have been blackmailing him? If he was responsible for the incident that split them up?’

  Liz frowned. ‘It doesn’t altogether fit with what we’ve been told about the girl. But yes, if Saunders made a mistake and Kerry covered for him it would give her a hold on him. Especially now he’s doing nicely in the lucrative world of private medicine.’

  ‘Blackmailers don’t have lunch with their victims. They don’t invite them to their homes while their husbands are out.’

  ‘Which makes him sound more like a lover. But maybe not. He knew her, there was no point setting up an elaborate blind if he knew where to find her. Perhaps she misjudged him. Perhaps she thought he’d pay up quietly and instead he killed her.’ She scowled. ‘But why then did he murder Mrs Board?’

  ‘Maybe he reckoned he had to. When she had time to think about Kerry’s death she’d guess who had a reason to kill her.’

  Liz wasn’t happy with it. ‘We hit the same problem: why would Kerry Page wait three years to put the screw on? Perrin first saw her visitor a year ago. And why would he pay up for twelve months, then take her out to lunch, then kill her?’

  ‘Maybe she asked for more money.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If she knew about Page’s partnership.’

  ‘She was blackmailing Saunders to buy her husband a share in his firm?’ Her voice wavered on the edge of doubt. ‘Hell, Donovan, I don’t know. That’s an awful lot of guesswork.’

  ‘It would work,’ Donovan said slowly, ‘if Kerry Page wasn’t the sweet kind girl we’ve been told she was and if Dr Saunders was a man who’d commit murder rather than give up a life style he was fond of. We’ll have a better idea about that when I’ve seen him. Then maybe I should talk to Page again.’

  ‘And I’ll take Mr Hawley up on his offer and go study his records,’ said Liz. ‘This whole blackmail business is pure conjecture. If Kerry and Saunders turn out to have been lovers we’re back to looking for someone with a grudge. In which case his name, or that of someone he loved, should appear on the theatre list shortly before the team split up.’

  ‘Modern surgery’s a production line,’ objected Donovan, ‘there’ll be dozens of them. How will you know which one they cocked up?’

  ‘I’ll ask Mr Hawley,’ Liz said.

  Almost the first thing Shapiro had done after he left his detective inspector dead and his detective sergeant drifting in and out of consciousness in the hospital was interview Jack Carney. That time he had gone to the man’s office, and had been received almost as courteously as Liz Graham would be four days later. He had, as Shapiro expected, a sound alibi: not so much Mrs Carney, who might have been willing to lie for him, as the doctor she summoned when Carney suffered palpitations in the middle of the night. As he was leaving the house the doctor, a locum with no known connections to either the Carney empire or the surgical department of Castle General, also saw McMeekin, half-dressed and apparently half-asleep, disturbed from his bed in the staff wing and anxious about his employer. It wasn’t as good an alibi for McMeekin as for Carney but it was probably as good as it could have been without exciting suspicion.

  This time Shapiro didn’t go to Carney’s office, he went to his house, and the welcome was measureably cooler. It became downright chilly when he announced the purpose of his visit. They were in Carney’s study: just the two of them, for once McMeekin was occupied elsewhere. The little man went a livid greyish-pink colour – perhaps the palpitations were not an invention – and his voice sank to a viperish rasp.

  ‘You’ve come here – to my house, to my wife’s house – to accuse me of – what? Having an affair with this woman, this Mrs Board? You and I have had our disagreements before this, Mr Shapiro, but I never expected that kind of vindictiveness from you. With all your unwarranted interest in my business concerns, you’ve never sunk to attacking my family life before.’

  ‘I’ve no wish to be vindictive,’ Shapiro said stolidly. ‘But I do want an answer to my question. Did you know Maggie Board, professionally, personally, or in any other way? I should warn you I have other officers out making the same enquiry in places where Mrs Board was known. If it’s true you’d be better telling me now.’

  Carney came to his feet behind his writing table, spilling his chair in his fury. ‘God damn you, Shapiro! You’ve got people going round this town – my town, the place where I live – making an allegation like that about me?’

  Shapiro, who had watched Jack Carney field accusations of vice, corruption, racketeering, drug dealing, and having people’s legs broken without flickering an eyelid, without ever letting the confident little half-smile slip from his lips, was surprised at the violence of his reaction. In another man it might have signalled a guilty conscience. But guilt was Carney’s natural state, something he was at ease with. Shapiro rather suspected that if it was true he’d have been better prepared for the question, would not have betrayed his feelings like this.

  ‘Making enquiries,’ he said, pedantically. ‘We do it all the time. Sometimes our enquiries lead to allegations, sometimes they don’t. It depends on the answers we get.’

  ‘I’ll give you my answer now,’ said Carney
, fast and hard. ‘I have never had an affair, with this woman or any other. As far as I know I’ve never met Mrs Board. I’ve certainly never spent time with her. And in case that’s your next question, I didn’t have someone blow her head off with a shot-gun.’

  Shapiro sniffed. ‘It wasn’t my next question. But I’d have got there eventually.’

  ‘Then I’m glad to have saved you the trouble,’ spat Carney.

  They weren’t making a great deal of progress, but Shapiro was aware of having Carney rattled and wanted to press the advantage. Even if there was nothing between Carney and Board there was so much else the man might say if he was angry enough.

  ‘You see my position,’ he said. ‘Three people have been killed in this town in the past week. As you and I very well know, you’d good reason for wanting Alan Clarke dead. And the other victims were the surgeon who operated on him and the wife of the man you hired as a pilot. Coincidence? Convince me.’

  ‘Convince you?’ It came out midway between a sneer and a snarl. ‘I don’t need to convince you of anything. Who are you that I should care what you think? I suppose there’s a certain novelty value in a Yid detective, all very Opportunities for the Ethnics I’m sure. But if I decide I’ve had enough of this I’ll break you. Then you’ll find out how many friends you have, in and out of the Force. The only thing that’ll save you then’ll be an emergency induction into the Masons. And I don’t think you’re eligible for that, are you?’

  Frank Shapiro had been insulted more subtly and therefore more effectively than that in his years as a policeman. He’d met prejudice from colleagues as well as from criminals, and found that infinitely harder to deal with. When a man was very probably a murderer it seemed silly to add, ‘And what’s more he’s anti-Semitic!’

  But he didn’t have to like it, and he didn’t have to take it sitting down. He too came to his feet, his thick body looming over the little Regency desk. ‘Shall I tell you something about coppers, Mr Carney?’ He made it sound like a very quiet threat. ‘A lot of them don’t like Jews. A lot of them don’t like blacks. Quite a few of them don’t like women, and almost none of them like the Irish. But the one thing they have in common, and this applies to every member of every police force in Britain, is that none of them will put up with dirty little toe-rags who think they’re immune to the law and they can grind other coppers into brick walls – even Irish coppers, even Jewish coppers – with impunity. You want to take me on, Mr Carney, go right ahead. But don’t think you can take me on alone.’

  He left then. He hadn’t learned very much more about Carney. But perhaps Carney had learned something about him.

  Donovan went to the Feyd Clinic first thing on Wednesday morning. Liz arranged for a young constable to drive him. The constable stopped feeling this was an honour before they’d gone the first mile. Donovan was a terrible back-seat driver and leaned into the curves.

  The clinic occupied a choice spot overlooking the Levels, a green sea touched with bronze. The expensive rooms at the front enjoyed a view all the way to the same River Arrow which, miles further up its course, wandered through the water-meadows where Kerry Page made love and died. The cheaper rooms overlooked the car park, the road, and an electricity sub-station.

  It was a smaller establishment than Donovan had expected, a low concrete box designed along minimalist lines, apparently by the same man who thought of nouvelle cuisine and charging more and more for less and less swimwear. In town it would have looked like a Social Services office. Out here amid the green, in an odd way it worked rather better. It was simple enough to slot into the landscape instead of imposing on it.

  Whatever money was saved by leaving the outside plain had been spent in the foyer. There was money on the walls, on the floor, in the furnishings, and behind reception. The effect was discreet, professional, reassuring. You could tell from the spring in the carpet that the people here would give you a nose job you’d never forget.

  The Feyd Clinic was owned by the same group as the Rosedale Nursing Home. It was to the field of cosmetic surgery and other fashionable treatments what Rosedale was to the care of the elderly: Rolls-Royce provision carrying a happy few up the fast lane while the National Health Service bus trundled along behind. The group offered top jobs and could afford to hand-pick its employees; indeed, could hardly afford not to. Any suspicions about Dr Saunders couldn’t have reached the ears of the appointments committee.

  Donovan asked for Saunders at the desk. The expensive receptionist rang his office but his secretary wasn’t expecting him. ‘He was in his consulting room until six o’clock last night,’ she said, quite breathlessly, as if this were a marathon session by Clinic standards. Perhaps it was. They wouldn’t do many emergency face-lifts.

  The receptionist wrote Dr Saunders’home address on a card. ‘Shall I phone and see if he’s in, Sergeant?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ The less time Emil Saunders had to think what he would say to the police the happier Donovan would be.

  Castle General was everything the Feyd Clinic was not: a rambling metropolis of a hospital, the oldest buildings of smoke-blackened Victorian brick with additions of every period since – substantial stucco from between the wars, worthy red brick from the fifties, a poorly conceived and worse executed tower-block from the seventies, and a dear little Arts and Crafts dentistry department – all dropped on to the campus as if from a height, landing at odd angles and with no regard for the relationship of one to the next. An accident victim with both burns and fractures could have such a journey between clinics that it was expedient to hail a passing ambulance. Someone on a geriatric ward who still had enough teeth to visit the dentist could die in transit.

  After the tower-block went up the site was full. Apart from the odd angles between the buildings, used for car parking, there was no room for further development. So when the next round of cottage-hospital closures increased the need for maternity, geriatric, and casualty beds at Castle General, patients were housed in the car parks, in prefabricated shells with consultants’ BMWs and nurses’ 2CVs for company.

  Liz, appalled by the scale and confusion of the site, hardly knew where to start. She stopped a man in a white coat and asked where the chief administrator’s office was, and the man pondered a moment and said he thought it was in the Victorian part though he once heard a rumour about it being in a red-brick annexe behind the tower-block. Then he asked if she knew the way out. He said he’d come here for his holiday jabs and been trying to leave ever since. Liz guessed then that he was joking, but clearly she was not the first person to have been overwhelmed by the chaotic architecture.

  Mr Hawley’s office was indeed in the Victorian core of the hospital. He greeted her with a formal inclination of the head. ‘I’m not sure what you’re looking for but my secretary and I will give whatever assistance we can.’

  Liz smiled disarmingly. ‘I’m not altogether sure what I’m looking for either. But it does seem a coincidence. In view of what’s happened, and the possibility that it’s not over yet, I think we have to explore every avenue.’

  Even Castle General had been computerized for more than four years so the records she was interested in were on disk. Hawley eyed the hardware as if he still didn’t quite trust it and said, ‘Are you familiar with the equipment? Miss McNair will operate it if you’d rather.’

  ‘Thanks.’ If there was one thing Liz’s time at Headquarters had fitted her for it was extracting information from computers. But it’s a rash policeman who turns down an offer of help. She would take over when the answers started coming.

  Hawley excused himself and went to withdraw to his inner sanctum. But Liz, almost without seeming to move, barred his way, slipping her jacket on to the back of a chair. She was as tall as him and her eyes caught and held his frosty gaze – Donovan was right, however polite he might seem he resented her being here, even at his invitation. She said, ‘Mr Hawley, if you knew why Mrs Board’s team broke up four years ago – even if it couldn’t have anythi
ng to do with what happened to her and Kerry Page – you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’

  His eyes didn’t flinch. ‘Naturally.’

  Liz nodded slowly, still watching him. ‘It’s a matter of priorities, isn’t it? In normal circumstances a degree of discretion about colleagues’failings would be appropriate. But different circumstances put a different complexion on it. If there’s any chance at all of people being hurt, no responsible person would put loyalty to a colleague above their duty to prevent that. I’m sure you’d agree, Mr Hawley.’

  Hawley seemed to swell with indignation but retained a rigid control of his voice. ‘I hope I know my duty as well as you do, Inspector. I will tell you again what I told your sergeant. I don’t know who shot either Mrs Page or Mrs Board, and I don’t know why. If there are any clues in our records I hope you’ll find them. I’ve given it some thought, without success. But then, detection is your job. Mine is running a hospital.’

  She learned nothing from reading the records, but then she had not expected to. She had Miss McNair print out details of the operations carried out by Maggie Board, Emil Saunders, and Kerry Carson in their last month together. If a mistake had occurred the consequences might not have shown at once. Also it would have taken time to arrange new schedules. Even a surgeon of Board’s eminence could hardly have thrown her anaesthetist and nurse bodily out of her theatre without explaining why, which plainly she had not done.

  Liz wanted to talk to the chief administrator again. She didn’t believe that he knew nothing of what must have been a significant upset within his period of office. But she needed a name to throw at him, and while that name was probably there in the records she had no way of recognizing it yet.