Dying to Know (4 page)

FOUR

I
n fact, it was only ten minutes before my father appeared in the small waiting room, escorted by a young, ginger-haired constable in his early twenties with acne and watery blue eyes who obviously regarded my father to be a clear and present danger to life, limb and the liberty of the individual. He also had the most impressive black eye, one of those ones that you can't help staring at, that pleads with you to ask how it was acquired. Worse, it was several days old, so that it was doing the wonderful metachromatic thing, irregularly fading into greens, yellows and oranges. It was a thing of beauty.

Dad, of course, was taking everything with supernatural calmness. It was by now two thirty in the morning but his greeting to us was exactly the same as if it had been that same hour of the clock in the afternoon.

‘Lance! How are you?'

‘Hi, Dad.'

‘Hello, Dr Elliot,' Max said and, as always, she was charm incarnate.

He turned to her. ‘Hello, Miss Christy.'

He smiled politely but insisted on using excessive formality when addressing Max which, in its way, was a very loud and very clear message delivered in the most subtle of ways. True, this was only the third occasion they had met, and the previous times had been somewhat fleeting, but normally by now Dad would have been showing my female companions his shrapnel scars and telling them how I could never get the hang of wiping my bottom when I was a toddler. With Max, though, there was a distance that I found irritating.

She enquired, ‘How have they treated you?'

My father considered this. He looked to me to be remarkably chipper, with no rubber truncheon marks showing anywhere, but he could be incredibly resilient and so appearances were not always reliable. ‘They've got it into their heads that I did it all on purpose.'

‘Which, of course, you didn't,' I suggested.

‘It was just an accident,' he insisted. He glanced over at Percy Bailey as he said this and suddenly I was wondering if this was a prudent place to be discussing the affair.

‘Come on, let's get you home. Max and I have to work in the morning, unlike others.'

Max said at once, ‘Don't be horrible, Lance. Your poor father has been through a terrible ordeal. I think a bit more sympathy would be more appropriate.'

I noticed that Dad seemed suddenly to find something to approve of in Max as he nodded and made the sad face of a disillusioned father who has just discovered that his only son is a bit of a swine.

I asked her, ‘What do you suggest?'

‘Perhaps you should take your father home with you tonight, rather than leaving him alone.'

My father watched me, his face expressionless apart from the eyes that were filled with something I suspected was amusement, as I mentally waved goodbye to sharing my bed with Max for the rest of the night. This would have been a small consolation for the ruin of the evening, but it seemed that even that was not to be mine. I took a deep breath. ‘Very well, then. Would you like to come home with me?'

He made a play of deep thought during which Max put in, ‘You could drop me off on the way there.' Max had a house in Green Lane on the east side of Norbury Park.

Dad eventually decided. He announced in a voice that implied he was being supremely magnanimous, ‘Very well, then. I will.'

When we had dropped Max off and I was driving home, I asked, ‘Why don't you like Max?'

‘Who said I didn't?'

‘You did.' He opened his mouth to protest but I carried on: ‘Not with words, but then you don't need such mundane things.'

He had turned to me, but now looked away. ‘She's not right for you, Lance.'

‘Why not?'

‘She's too young, for a start.'

‘Age isn't everything.'

He said at once, ‘Yes, it is. Believe me, I know.'

‘She's only thirteen years younger than me.' Even as I was hearing these words I was thinking that they didn't help my cause. Dad said nothing, but then he didn't need to and I was left to fill in. ‘She's incredibly bright. Gold medal in veterinary school, excellent academic career, then straight into a job . . .'

All he said was, ‘I can see that.'

‘She's kind, attentive . . . look how she was worried about you.'

‘Oh, absolutely,' he agreed and somehow managed to leave me with a feeling of dissatisfaction.

‘Well, then . . .'

Whenever I drove him anywhere, he was normally a bad passenger. He liked to tell me how he had been driving for fifty years and had only ever had one accident (which, of course, was not his fault). I had a slightly different perspective, though. In my opinion he drove erratically, with scant regard for other road users, even less for pedestrians; he never used his rear-view mirror, never stopped at pedestrian crossings, never let other cars in ahead of him, and never thanked those who let
him
in. It seemed to me that he paid more attention to the road and what was going on around him when he sat in my passenger seat than he ever did when he was in nominal control of the car.

Tonight, though, he was uncharacteristically subdued; I assumed that the events of the night had taken more out of him than he cared to admit. For a few moments there was only the sound of the engine and the tyres on the road, when he said, ‘I can see that she's a very attractive, very bright, very kind girl, Lance. It's just that I don't think you and she are right together.'

I wanted to argue, to point out all the holes in his view, that he was being unreasonable and frankly
old
, but I didn't. I wasn't sure why, but perhaps it was because I knew he was tired, perhaps because I was tired, perhaps – conceivably – it was because I was afraid he was right.

In an effort to escape thinking too much more about all this, I asked, ‘So, you were entertaining Ada Clarke, then.'

‘I was. And it was going very well, too. I'd cooked her a nice bit of braised steak with mushrooms, and we'd had a drop of wine, and I thought that, in view of the occasion, I'd finish the evening off with some fireworks. Ada likes fireworks. Who knows what might have happened if things had turned out differently?'

I broke all the rules of road safety and closed my eyes, partly in horror at what he was implying, partly in exasperation as I thought about what might have happened for
me
if things had turned out differently. I had to grit my teeth as I said tightly, ‘Don't you think you're a bit old to be playing with fire?'

He was indignant. ‘I wasn't playing. I was entertaining a lady, nothing more.'

‘It was bloody irresponsible to stick a rocket in a milk bottle without burying it; of course it might have toppled over at the wrong moment.'

He did not reply for a long while and it was not until we were almost at my house that he murmured, ‘It didn't happen
exactly
like that . . .'

A sense of horror that I knew well began to creep up on me. ‘What does that mean?'

His head bobbed from side to side as he stared straight ahead while he admitted the awful truth. ‘It was completely accidental that I burned down his shed . . .'

There was a ‘but' at the end of that sentence, and it was a bloody big one. His voice dropped quite noticeably as he supplied it. ‘But that's because I was aiming at his conservatory.'

‘What?' My eyes came off the road and he reacted at once because the car veered dangerously close to the parked vehicles on his side. I jerked the steering wheel and we just avoided a collision. He had to comment, of course.

‘Be careful, Lance. How many times do I have to tell you to keep your eyes on the road at all times?'

‘You really were trying to fire rockets at Lightoller?'

‘It was just a bit of fun. Ada thought it was most amusing. She doesn't like them either. They were most rude about the bell-ringing. Said it was an awful din that should be banned.'

‘Dad . . .'

‘Don't worry. She won't say anything. They can't prove a thing.'

He didn't seem to have grasped the point and I hastened to put him right. ‘You set fire to his shed! Supposing you had done the same to his house? You might have killed both of them.'

‘Oh, don't be melodramatic, Lance. That's always been your trouble – over-egging the recipe. Your mother was the same; she always saw disaster when it wasn't there. I remember once—'

‘Dad, it was the height of irresponsibility.'

‘Oh, tosh. Anyway, Masson confirmed my suspicions about the Lightollers.'

‘What suspicions?'

‘That there's something shady about them.'

It didn't sound like the kind of thing that the Inspector Masson I loved and adored would say. ‘In what way shady?'

‘Well, he didn't say, exactly . . .'

‘So what
did
he say? Exactly, I mean.'

But Dad, as he so often did, retreated into vagaries. ‘He intimated that Lightoller isn't quite the upstanding citizen he makes himself out to be.'

In other words, Dad had heard what he wanted to hear and seen what he wanted to see.

We had reached my house and I turned right off the road and on to the hardstanding in front of the attached garage. As I turned the engine off, I said, ‘Dad, whether Oliver Lightoller is an archbishop or the greatest criminal mastermind since Fu Man Chu is irrelevant. Trying to hit his house with a firework rocket is reckless and potentially disastrous.'

He had opened the door and was climbing out, so he delivered his response – his considered response – across the partly melted frost on the car roof. ‘That's what Masson said. It's poppycock, of course, as I told him. The chances that a small firework rocket will result in a conflagration are minuscule. Having strenuously reassured him that I had never had any intention of hitting the shed, I pointed out that it was only because the fool had left the door open and kept large bottles of white spirit and turps on the shelves – where they could have fallen off and smashed at any time – that a fire had started. Otherwise, I am convinced, there would have been little damage.'

He slammed his door shut to emphasize his certainty, apparently under the impression that all my neighbours were deaf.

As so often before, I had the distinct impression that normality was a pathetically fragile thing, easily broken by the lunacy of my ancient progenitor. I needed to get to bed and to sleep quickly, before the gates of insanity opened never to close again. As I let him in, I said tersely, ‘I only hope that Ada supports your story.'

‘Don't worry. She will.'

FIVE

T
he next day's morning surgery dragged like a Wagner opera played andante. General Practice is about helping people as much as treating them, which means that you spend a lot of time just listening to people's problems, their disappointments and their successes, even though they may walk through the door complaining of a cold, backache, pain in their belly or mouth ulcers. I can probably only effectively treat half of the medical conditions they bring to me, but I like to think that the psychological support I give them is just as valuable and this gives me great comfort. That morning, though, I was just too tired; by the time Samuel James Metcalfe Hocking hove into view, I was ready to surrender, the white flag unfurled and waving in the breeze.

It wasn't his fault. To be fair to him, he wasn't a particularly regular customer – unlike some of my patients who seem to regard the surgery as a day centre – and when he did present, it was usually for a good reason. Unfortunately, on this day, it was with backache. Now, modern medicine has made fantastic advances in almost all areas, save one: this one. Moreover, it hasn't progressed one whit. Why? Because to you the back is just a bit of your body you can't see, the place where the limbs meet and that keeps your head well above your bottom. To a doctor, the back is an incredibly complicated musculo-skeleto-neural structure that we don't really understand. Patients are completely incapable of appreciating why, when all they've got is a simple problem, I rarely seem to have a simple answer.

I knew at once what he was going to say, could see it written in his stiff posture, the tightness of his face. ‘I can barely get out of bed in the morning.'

It took him a good sixty seconds to lower himself into the chair, all the while his face an eloquent testament to the pain he was in. He had a broad face with light-blue eyes and laugh lines around his mouth.

‘When did it start?'

‘About two days ago.'

‘What were you doing when it started?'

He shrugged. ‘Work, I suppose.'

‘Does that involve a lot of lifting?'

He frowned. ‘Of course.' This was said as if I should have known. When I looked through his notes, I saw that he was a baker.

‘A
master
baker,' he corrected me when I confirmed it with him; clearly, in his eyes, there was quite a social chasm between mere bakers and the masters of the art.

‘And that involves lifting what?'

‘Dough, and lots of it.'

Obvious, really.

‘Have you ever had back trouble before?'

‘The odd twinge.'

And so on through all the usual questions about pain down the legs, performance of the waterworks and bowels, numbness and tingling, until it came to time to examine him. As he stripped off his shirt (slowly), then stood up with his back to me, I was able to appreciate that he was a muscular man.

It was a painful examination both for him and, indeed, for me when he overbalanced and trod heavily on my corns. At its end, I didn't really have much idea what was wrong with him, although I thought it unlikely to be a slipped disc. In my best voice I pronounced, ‘I think you may have strained your sacroiliac joints.'