Deception in the Cotswolds (16 page)

But at ten o’clock, just as she was wondering about an extended shopping expedition to Stroud, she heard footsteps approaching the house. The spaniel yapped, several seconds after Thea already knew they had a visitor, eliciting Thea’s usual comment about her uselessness as a guard dog.

She went to the open door, to be met by the
ginger-headed
Toby, looking tousled and bleary.

‘Goodness! Are you all right?’ she burst out. ‘Has something else happened?’

He rubbed his head. ‘What? No, I don’t think so. What do you mean?’

‘Just that you look – well, dishevelled. Sorry. How rude of me. What can I do for you?’

‘Is Mimm here? She said to meet her at the Lodge and there’s no sign of her.’

A cold hand squeezed Thea’s heart. Surely history couldn’t be about to repeat itself? ‘Is her car there?’

He shook his head.

‘So she’s probably just late, then. It’s Saturday. She’ll have her kids at home. Did she say a time?’

He rubbed his head again. ‘I’m not sure. I think she said early.’

‘Come in and have some coffee. Where’s your car?’

‘Outside the Lodge. I walked up here.’ He seemed to be finding it difficult to construct whole thoughts, his brain muffled by sleeplessness or a bad hangover. He followed her into the house and through the hall into the kitchen.

‘Where do you live?’ she asked him, aware of this as a gap in her knowledge.

‘Gloucester. I’m renting a flat.’

She looked searchingly at him. Something over forty, slight, awkward, he was the sort of man you overlooked in a group. And yet he had suffered the torment of losing his young wife, only a year previously. ‘You must be terribly upset about Donny,’ she ventured.

‘Yeah.’ He frowned. ‘He was good to me. When Cissie was in hospital all the time, he was great. Paid for stuff. Sat with her when I was working.’

For the first time, Thea began to imagine how it might be to have a long-term relationship with a hospital when you had something as monumentally
serious as a heart transplant. The place would become like a second home, the staff increasingly familiar, with emotional ups and downs as tests were run, results announced, predictions made. And the costs involved must be substantial. Never before had that occurred to her. ‘What work do you do?’ she asked.

He gave a twisted smile. ‘I was a college lecturer,’ he said. ‘That’s how I met Cissie, when she was a student. But I had to give it up when she was having her operation. I wasn’t coping too well.’

‘What subject did you teach?’

‘Marketing.’

‘Was Cecilia one of your students?’

‘No, she was doing fine art. She fainted in the refectory one lunchtime and I caught her. I just happened to be standing right in front of her when she keeled over.’

How romantic
, she wanted to say, but stopped herself. It didn’t look as if Toby found it romantic at all. It looked as if he had come to the limits of his endurance. ‘So what did you and Jemima have planned?’

He looked at her in bewilderment. ‘What?’

‘I mean, why were you meeting her?’

‘Oh! She wants to give me his clothes. Should fit me, most of it.’ His face crumpled fleetingly, which Thea took to be the natural resistance to wearing a dead man’s things. But some people found it comforting, rather than morbid. She remembered her grandmother
wearing a big Aran sweater that had belonged to her grandad, for years after he died.

‘Well, she’ll come and find you, I expect, when she sees the car.’ He nodded dumbly, and she went on, ‘Do you know Harriet at all?’

‘Oh yes. I bought a couple of her geckoes. Dempsey and Makepeace. I’ve got them in the flat, even though you’re not meant to have pets.’

‘I imagine geckoes don’t really count.’

‘Right. Are you in charge of the eggs, then? How many are there now?’

He seemed more animated by this turn of the conversation, which she supposed made some kind of sense. ‘Dozens. I just hope nothing hatches out before she gets back.’

‘Why? It’s fantastic when they do. You can’t believe it could ever have fitted inside the shell, when they uncurl. I was here once when it happened. Magic.’ He sighed. ‘Not that mine’ll ever work. I can’t get them warm enough.’

Thea wondered about his financial situation, without a job and living in what sounded like a fairly basic flat. ‘Will you go back to work soon?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Have to, won’t I? They stop the benefits if they think you’re fit enough. The trouble is, I don’t think I’ll ever manage to face it again.’

‘Oh? Not even in a different place? A different sort of teaching, maybe? You must be very employable. They always want teachers, don’t they?’

He looked at her despairingly. ‘You don’t know much about it, do you? It’s all pressure and people ordering you about and everyone scared of getting it wrong. It’s too much. I can’t do it any more. I never was much good, anyhow,’ he admitted with a grimace. ‘I never could manage to engage their interest.’

‘Perhaps you should do nurse training, then – after all your experience.’

It was completely the wrong thing to say. Toby’s eyes bulged and he put a hand over his mouth as if to hide a snarl. ‘I don’t think so,’ he grated. ‘If you stopped for a minute, you’d realise what a mad idea that is.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was only …’
Trying to help?
That wasn’t really true. She had, in fact, been flippant at precisely the wrong moment. Anybody less like a nurse than this man would be difficult to find. ‘I expect you’ve had more than enough nursing already, with your wife, and then Donny.’

‘I didn’t
nurse
them,’ he corrected her. ‘I watched other people messing them about – Cissie, anyway. Donny quite rightly kept well out of their clutches.’

By some association, Thea thought of Donny’s blocked bowel and the probable remedies that would be called for. Had Donny assumed that Toby would nurse him at the end of his life, keeping it in the family and avoiding any need for doctors and hospitals that way? They seemed to share a common attitude to hospitals, at least.

‘I suppose they did their best for her?’ she ventured.

‘Who?’

‘The hospital. After the transplant. I assume they did everything they could?’

He slumped in his chair, his head dropping until it almost touched the table. She expected him to remain silent, unable to bear the memories, or the implications of another death in the family. But gradually, he straightened, and began to speak. ‘You know what? They used the heart of a sixty-nine-
year-old
man who’d smoked most of his life. They said her system was healthy and strong enough to make sure it worked, and it was only a muscle, after all. She wasn’t supposed to know where it came from, but somebody told her, and that sent her over the edge. She flipped. She wasn’t her usual self, anyway. Her brain was starved of oxygen in the operation, if you ask me, though they never admitted it. She tried to rip it out.’ He said the final sentence in a husky whisper, increasing the horror of the image. ‘I knew we’d lost her then.’

Thea remembered Donny’s flat report:
They did a transplant and she died
. Did he know the full story of what Cecilia and Toby had had to endure?

‘Surely the hospital … I mean, wouldn’t they have talked all that through with her beforehand?’

He made a gesture of despair at her lack of comprehension. ‘You’re not meant to
talk
about stuff like that. You have to be grateful and compliant. Not
just the patients, either. The
staff
have to stick to the same line as well. They have to lie to people all the time, for their own good – or so they tell you. They use baby talk and smile all the time, when in fact there’s nothing at all to smile about. The patients
know
they’re being lied to, but they can’t get hold of what’s true. So they feel confused all the time, and that frightens them. The nurses won’t answer straight questions, because they worry the doctor will yell at them. When the doctor finally does tell you something important, it’ll be in language you can’t understand. So the patients make things up for themselves, trying to find some sense in what’s going on, asking each other all the time.’

‘It sounds nightmarish,’ said Thea, shocked by the powerful images being conjured. ‘But surely it isn’t generally like that? You must have been unlucky.’

‘Who knows? What difference would that make?’

‘You should have had somebody to talk your feelings through with. You
and
Cissie. Surely somebody must have noticed how scared and confused you were?’

‘It was always somebody else’s job. There was a ward sister, called Abigail Williams, who we both loathed. She was totally disorganised, always on the phone about something, or yelling at the nurses. She wasn’t cruel or mean, but just out of her depth. And you know something – that was
worse
, because you couldn’t complain about her. You just had to watch her trying to stay in control, and worry that she was going to make some terrible mistake. Cissie actually
felt sorry for her to start with, and tried to make things easier for her. But she took that as criticism and turned nasty. She wouldn’t admit her failings. She never knew what was going to happen next, so it was no good trying to get anything out of her.

‘You know what it reminded me of? – and I realise this is going to sound crazy – a book I read when I was nineteen and never got out of my head. About the Nazi concentration camps.
If This is a Man
. When they first arrive, the prisoners do nothing but ask questions, all the time. They’re desperate to understand what’s going on, what will happen to them. And nobody ever answers them. The people who’ve been there a while are scornful of these pathetic efforts to find a bit of sense when there just isn’t any. Well, that was how I felt when I spent those weeks sitting with Cissie in that hospital.’ His voice had risen and increased in volume, until the end, which was little more than a whisper.

Thea swallowed down an urge to dismiss everything he’d said as pure paranoia, or at least some sort of avoidance strategy to dodge the anguish of his young wife’s death. The comparison between a hospital and a Nazi death camp went far beyond the rational, after all. But she could see no constructive way to respond, other than changing the subject. ‘It’s a shame you didn’t know Philippe,’ she remarked. ‘He’s a heart surgeon. He might have been able to explain everything to you.’

‘Philippe Ferrier, you mean?’ His face twisted again.

‘I suppose so. I haven’t heard his surname.’

Toby spoke over her. ‘I knew him all right.’

‘So? Wasn’t he any help?’

‘He might have been if we’d coughed up a small fortune for his services.’

‘He’s private?’ Somehow it fitted, she realised. The sleek, well-groomed appearance, the patronising manner. NHS doctors had learnt to modify the patrician tones and behaviour that most surgeons had once possessed. But those in the private sector might well retain the old-fashioned ways.

Toby nodded exaggeratedly. ‘You got it,’ he said.

‘What about Donny?’ she asked. ‘Was he there when all this was happening?’ She mentally traced the chain of relationships from Philippe to Cecilia, via Donny, Edwina and Thyrza. Not entirely surprising, she concluded, that the surgeon had failed to offer free care to the daughter of his aunt’s gentleman friend.

It was as if he hadn’t heard her. He drank his tepid coffee and stared blankly at the table. Finally, he said, in the same forced whisper, ‘Donny wanted to die. Cissie didn’t. It was all wrong.’

‘But he’s done it now,’ she said, trying to follow the logic. ‘And you can’t make that sort of comparison, can you? After all, it comes to everybody sooner or later.’

The twisted smile returned. ‘It’s the “sooner or later” that matters, though, isn’t it?’

She was suitably chastened. Ordinarily, that was
the sort of thing she would have said, and she felt somehow trumped by this unhappy man. ‘It is, of course,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I was being glib.’

‘People are,’ he nodded, as if aware of the point he had scored. ‘Even Donny sometimes. And Edwina. She’s been a lot of trouble to us.’

‘Oh?’ She visualised the woman, who had appeared to be uncontroversial in most of the ways that mattered. ‘You mean because she said she’d assist his suicide, if he wanted her to?’

Toby’s eyes bulged. ‘What? No – that was just talk. She’d never have found the nerve. I mean about Cissie’s mum – Janet. It was Edwina who got her into the home, and persuaded Donny she didn’t need him to visit because she’d forgotten who he was.’

‘You think she did that because she wanted him all to herself?’

He nodded irritably, as if that was too obvious to warrant verbalising.

‘And what about Jemima? She seems to agree that her mother doesn’t need anybody now.’

‘They’re wrong. All of them. Alzheimer’s people don’t forget everything. It comes and goes. She knows she’s abandoned, and she’s heartbroken about it.’

‘Did you tell them that?’

‘They wouldn’t listen. It’s all down to me. I have to carry it all on my shoulders. I went to tell her when Cissie died, and she was much the same as she’d always been. She understood, and she cried, and asked why
they never visit. I’m the only one who sees her now. They act as if she’s dead.’

‘But Donny couldn’t have got there on his own. Did you offer to take him?’

‘Once or twice. Edwina always sabotaged it. She’s good at that.’

‘And yet you seemed quite friendly with her when the two of you came here the other day.’

‘For his sake,’ he explained shortly.

‘So you don’t think she did help him? That in effect she killed him?’

‘Of course not.’ His voice came loud and harsh, close to anger. ‘Of
course
not. He did it himself.’

‘You really think he could have done it all on his own? The tape and everything?’

‘He wanted to die,’ came the oblique reply. ‘Donny wanted to die when Cissie died. It was only Jemima that stopped him. And Harriet.’

‘Harriet? But—’ She wanted to quote from Harriet’s book, to reveal her assumption that Harriet was very much in favour of people controlling the manner and timing of their own death. That surely she’d have been in line as an assistant in the suicide, if it came to that. But she bit back the words. They were venturing onto dangerous ground, the shadowy figure of DI Higgins pushing itself forward in her mind.