Bloodline-9 (14 page)

‘So, why don’t you stop going on like you’re the only one who gives a shit and get out there and do your job?’

The cab stopped and Hol and passed the money forward, gave a reasonable tip and asked for a receipt. The driver kept one eye on the rear-view mirror as he scribbled. He had clearly been ear-wigging al the way from the station, and when he had torn off the slip of paper and handed it across, he asked Hol and if he and his friend were there to arrest anyone.

Thorne climbed out and slammed the door.

‘Got anybody in mind?’ Hol and asked, one foot already outside the car.

The driver grinned. ‘I could tel you some bloody stories and that’s the truth.’

Hol and slammed his own door then and fol owed Thorne, caught up with him by a smal cluster of smokers gathered outside the entrance. ‘Is your glass
ever
half ful ?’ he asked.

They strol ed through the automatic doors, walked past a smal shop sel ing magazines and chocolates, soft toys and bunches of flowers that made the average garage look like a Kensington florist’s. ‘You think I should look on the bright side a bit more?’

‘Just admitting that there is one might be a start,’ Hol and said.

Once they had passed through the A and E Department’s reception area, they stopped to ask directions. Eventual y they picked up signs for the Neurological Department and a few minutes later were walking towards the lifts that would take them up to the right floor.

‘You got any mints or anything?’ Thorne asked.

Hol and shook his head. ‘We could nip back to that shop.’

Thorne said it didn’t matter. He was not a big fan of the smel , that was al . Bleach and whatever else. He had glanced up at the signs as they’d walked.

Oncology. Dementia Unit. Antenatal Suite.

‘It’s a bloody stupid expression anyway,’ he said. He tried to keep his voice level. ‘Surely what’s
in
your glass is a bit more important.’

‘I suppose.’

‘What if it’s a dirty glass and it’s half ful of hot piss?’

They final y found the room they were looking for behind a busy ward, at the far end of a corridor with a shiny grey floor and paintings on the wal that looked as though they had been done by patients stil recovering from head injuries. The sign on the door said ‘Neurosurgical Secretaries’ and, on entering, Thorne and Hol and were confronted by three women who turned in unison and stared. Hol and let them know, in a quieter voice than Thorne was used to, that they had an appointment. The eldest of the women stood up and walked past him to a door that was al but hidden by an enormous filing cabinet. She knocked, and after a few seconds’ muttered conversation, Thorne and Hol and were shown into Doctor Pavesh Kambar’s office.

Thorne nodded back towards the secretaries’ room. ‘They al yours?’ he asked.

‘I share them,’ Kambar said. He spoke like a newsreader on Radio 4. ‘There’s something of a pecking order.’

‘Are you talking about the doctors or the secretaries?’

‘Both.’ Kambar nodded the same way that Thorne had. ‘But it’s rather more fierce out there.’

Kambar was a fit-looking man in his mid-fifties. His hair was thick, silvering, like his wel -trimmed moustache, and the dark suit and polished brogues, though understated, were clearly expensive. By contrast, his office was windowless, no more than a quarter the size of the one shared by the secretaries, and there was only one chair other than his own. Thorne took it, leaving Hol and to lean back a little awkwardly against the door. A year planner was mounted on the wal , while Hol and’s head rested at the same level as a model of the human brain that sat at the end of a bookshelf, its different sections moulded in brightly coloured plastic: blue, white and pink.

Thorne turned and looked from Hol and to the model. ‘It’s probably a damn sight bigger than yours,’ he said.

While Thorne told Kambar about their journey up, and the doctor bemoaned the vicissitudes of the London to Cambridge rail service, Hol and dug into his briefcase for a photocopy of the pieced-together X-ray fragments. He handed it over. ‘What we talked about on the phone.’

Kambar nodded, studied the picture for a few seconds. He turned to his computer and punched at the keyboard. ‘And this is where it comes from . . .’

Thorne shifted his chair a little closer and peered at the screen. There were three images which, at first glance, appeared identical: a cross-section of a brain, grey against a black background, with a white, almost perfectly round mass towards the bottom.

‘I printed one out for you,’ Kambar said. He opened a drawer and took out what looked like a large X-ray. ‘These days al the images are digital, stored on disc, but we stil occasional y use film if we need to.’ He fastened the X-ray to the light box that ran the length of the wal above his desk and studied it, as though he had never seen it before.

‘So what happened to the original?’ Thorne asked.

‘There was no original as such,’ Kambar said. ‘As I explained, the scans are stored on computer.’

Thorne pointed to the photocopy lying on Kambar’s desk. ‘So where did they come from?’

‘Wel , nobody would have had any reason to print one of these things out before I did,’ Kambar said. ‘So, my guess is that they’re from one of the series I printed out and gave to Raymond Garvey a few weeks before he died. Every patient is ful y entitled to keep copies of al their medical records.’ He pointed as Thorne stared at the images. ‘The white mass is the tumour, obviously.’

Hol and had moved forward. ‘Looks enormous,’ he said.

Kambar made a fist. ‘That big.’

‘How long did you treat him?’ Thorne asked.

Kambar fiddled with a pencil as he took them through a potted history of Garvey’s diagnosis, treatment and, ultimately, his death. Hol and made notes and Thorne listened, his eyes drifting occasional y to the pictures, stark against the light box. The simple white shadow, round and smooth, looked like nothing.

‘About three and a half years ago, Garvey had what looked like an epileptic fit in his cel at Whitemoor, gashed his head open on the side of his bunk. Turns out he’d had a few similar episodes, so they took him to the district hospital in Peterborough and did a CT scan. They would only have had the vaguest idea of what they were looking at, but we’re image-linked to most of the other hospitals, so they were able to ask us to have a look. We had . . . more than a vague idea. He came here a few weeks later for an MRI.’

Kambar stood up and took the plastic brain from the shelf. ‘He had a massive tumour at the base of the frontal lobe. What’s cal ed a benign meningioma.’

‘Benign?’
Hol and said. ‘I thought it was the malignant ones that kil ed you.’

Kambar was turning the plastic brain over in his hands. ‘They’l kil you slightly quicker, that’s al . If a benign tumour grows big enough, the inter-cranial pressure wil almost certainly be fatal. That’s why we needed to operate. Here . . .’ He lifted the model with one hand and pointed with the other to a pair of narrow paral el strips at the back. ‘These are the olfactory grooves.’

‘That’s
smell
, right?’ Hol and asked.

Kambar nodded. ‘Garvey’s tumour was sitting right there. A whopping great olfactory-groove meningioma.’ He looked at Hol and. ‘In fact, issues with the patient’s sense of smel are often among the earliest symptoms. Garvey claimed he had been having problems for many years. Smel ing burning or petrol for no reason. Smel ing nothing at al , more often than not.

Sadly for him, his tumour did not present ful y until long after these problems began, by which time it was far too late.’

Thorne took the model from Kambar and held it for a few seconds until he started to feel a little foolish, then passed it over for Hol and to put back on the shelf. ‘So, you operated?’

‘Not for several months,’ Kambar said. ‘The inter-cranial pressure was building, no question, but there was no reason to think he was in any immediate danger. Anyway, it took him a few weeks to make up his mind. It was a high-risk procedure.’

‘But he stil decided to go ahead.’

‘He did a good deal of hard thinking,’ Kambar said. ‘Took advice from some of the people he was close to. Not that there were lots of
them
, of course.’

‘Not too many likely to miss him,’ Hol and said.

‘Quite.’

‘So he died on the table?’ Thorne asked.

‘Shortly afterwards,’ Kambar said. ‘An extradural haemorrhage. He never real y woke up.’ He switched off the light box, took down the X-ray and handed it to Thorne. ‘You can keep this, if it wil be useful.’

Thorne looked at the three pictures of Raymond Garvey’s brain, the tumour that had grown within it. Garvey had brutal y murdered seven women and, though it had happened earlier than he might have liked, he had been granted a relatively peaceful death. Now, three years on, someone was kil ing again. But why? On his behalf? In his name? Someone had left pieces of this very picture for the police to find and they stil had no idea how it had come to be in his possession, nor what connected him to Raymond Garvey.

‘Any idea who he might have spoken to?’ Thorne asked. ‘Those people you said he was close to.’

Kambar thought for a few moments, chewed the end of his pencil. ‘There were a couple of other prisoners, I think. Other vulnerable ones, like him.’

‘I don’t suppose you can you remember any names?’

‘I’m sorry.’

Thorne turned to Hol and. ‘Maybe we should get over to Whitemoor this afternoon.’

Hol and smiled. ‘You angling for another overnight?’

‘And the son, obviously,’ Kambar said.

‘We’l make it back tonight—’ Thorne stopped. He watched Hol and’s eyes go to Kambar, saw the confusion on his face, then spun around in his chair. ‘Sorry,
what
?’

‘Yes, thinking about it, his son probably ended up with al Garvey’s things,’ Kambar said. ‘The X-rays and so on, after the funeral.’

‘Garvey had no relatives,’ Thorne said. ‘Wel , there’s an elderly uncle somewhere, but certainly no son.’

Kambar pul ed a face, as if he were struggling with a particularly cryptic crossword clue. ‘Wel , there was definitely someone
claiming
to be his son. Someone who made my life rather a misery for a number of weeks after Garvey died. Leaving al sorts of messages, ranting on my answering machine. I’m pretty sure the same went for the governor at Whitemoor.

Pestered the poor chap for ages.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Anthony Garvey.’

‘“Anthony” was Ray Garvey’s middle name,’ Thorne said. ‘Sounds iffy to me.’ He sat back, shaking his head. ‘No . . . can’t be.’ He looked at Hol and, who could do no more than throw up his hands.

‘Wel ,
Garvey
thought he was his son,’ Kambar said. ‘This man visited him several times a week for years. He had hundreds of letters from Garvey, too.’

‘What do you mean he made your life a misery?’ Hol and asked. ‘Did he blame you for what happened to his father?’

‘Not so much that,’ Kambar said. ‘Although he obviously wasn’t happy about the consequences of the operation. No, he thought there should be a retrial—’

Thorne sat up very straight.
‘What?’

‘He wanted me to give evidence on his father’s behalf.’

‘Why on earth would there be a retrial? There was never the slightest doubt that Garvey was guilty.’

‘Never the slightest doubt that he committed the murders, certainly. ’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘Anthony Garvey was convinced that, were there to be a retrial, his father’s conviction would be overturned. They had been talking about it ever since Garvey was first diagnosed.’ He jabbed the tip of his pencil at the X-ray in Thorne’s lap. ‘They were convinced that the tumour had altered his personality; that effectively he had not been himself when he had kil ed those women. He wanted me to clear his father’s name.’

Thorne looked again at Hol and, who was scribbling furiously. He glanced up, shrugged and returned to his notebook. Thorne turned back to Kambar, but could not think of anything to say. The information was stil settling, the different strands becoming tangled as quickly as he tried to tease them out.

‘You stil haven’t said what this is al about,’ Kambar said. ‘Raymond Garvey has been dead for over three years.’

Hol and stopped writing. ‘I’m sure you understand that we’re not real y at liberty to go into details.’

‘Of course.’ Kambar looked a little embarrassed, began to straighten some papers. ‘Just curious, that’s al . It would be nice to know what was going on.’

‘You’re at the back of a very long queue,’ Thorne said.

THIRTEEN

The Addenbrooke’s staff canteen was no more pleasant a place to eat lunch than its equivalent at Becke House. The food was probably a little better, as was the standard of conversation at the tables, but even on the top floor, which was dedicated to administration, there was no escaping that hospital smel .

Bleach and whatever else.

They carried their trays to a table in the corner, put down plates and cutlery, a bottle of stil water and a can of Diet Coke. Both had plumped for the lasagne, though the doctor had chosen to accompany it with a green salad, which had almost, but not quite, prompted his visitor to put back his chips.

‘What wil your col eague do for lunch?’ Kambar asked.

‘Not sure,’ Thorne said. They had rung through to make an emergency appointment with the governor at Whitemoor and, once it was confirmed, Hol and had taken a cab back to Cambridge station. From there, it was a thirty-minute train journey to the smal station at March, which was a short taxi ride from the prison.

‘He might get there in time to eat with the governor.’

‘Maybe,’ Thorne said. He guessed that Hol and would prefer to make other arrangements. As far as smel s that stayed with you long after you’d left the premises went, there wasn’t much to choose between a hospital and a prison. ‘He’l probably just grab a sandwich on the train.’

Thorne and Kambar began to eat.

‘Is it possible?’ Thorne asked. ‘This change of personality business.’