Dying to Know (9 page)

ELEVEN

T
hankfully, it was a relatively quiet call. There were two cases of influenza, three of measles and three of chest pain (at least two of which were, I'm fairly sure, indigestion), all fairly non-taxing. Which was just as well, since I had not managed to get back to sleep after picking up Dad from the police station and ferrying him home.

The conversation had been fairly one-sided, as I had spent most of the time listening while he prattled on as if I were picking him up from a coach trip to the seaside. He was cheerful, almost triumphant, constantly repeating the refrain that, ‘I knew I'd win in the end'. I wondered if he had been as verbose in the police station and if that were the reason he had finally been slung out on his ear.

‘They had no proof, of course,' he proclaimed for the fifth time as I pulled up outside his house. Some peculiar piece of operatic tripe came on the radio; I vaguely thought that this was odd, as it was tuned to Radio One, but thought nothing of it.

‘So I gather.'

He looked out of his window. ‘We are at my house,' he said, apparently surprised.

I mentally applauded his observational skills. ‘We are.'

A deep frown. ‘You're not taking me to your house, then?'

I thought of Max tucked up in my bed, and thought then of his reaction to such a situation. ‘Not tonight, Dad. I'm due on call in less than four hours, so I'd like to get back to bed as soon as possible.'

His expression was unreadable; it contained elements of disappointment, suspicion and disapproval, but in what proportions I could not say. ‘Very well,' he decided, somewhat huffily.

‘I'll hang around until you're settled.'

‘It's all right. Don't worry.'

He was out of the car and heading up the garden path. I hurried after him. ‘Dad, I'm sorry, but—'

Fumbling for a key in the brown paper envelope that the police had returned to him when they had let him go, he mumbled, ‘You go home, now. I might have been through a frightful ordeal for the past twenty-four hours, but at least it's over now.'

‘Dad . . .'

‘No sleep, constant harassment, intensive interrogation.'

Which was odd, because that wasn't the impression he had been giving me up until that point. He got the door open, and stepped inside. I tried to follow him but he held up his hand. ‘Lance, it's time you were back in your bed. I'm very grateful for what you've done, but enough is enough. You must think of yourself.'

With which the door was shut quite firmly and with enough of a crash to loosen my fillings.

My news that I had diagnosed cases of influenza and measles the night before left my colleagues in deep gloom.

‘Here we go,' predicted Jack in a voice of sepulchral doom. ‘The winter's come and with it the pestilence.'

Brian said nothing but his nod was the nod of a man taking no pleasure in agreement. It was left to Jane to be positive. ‘Perhaps it won't be too bad this year.'

Jack scoffed. ‘Even when it's not too bad, it's bad, isn't it, Brian?'

Brian nodded again. He was due on call that night and he tended to the taciturn when faced with this prospect. Not that he was ever especially voluble.

It was Jack who changed the subject. ‘What's happening with your father?'

‘He's been released.'

Everyone was pleased. ‘So I should bloody well think,' said Jack. ‘Can't have PC Plod running around arresting doctors whenever they get the whim.'

‘Absolutely,' agreed Brian.

‘Not a stain on his character, I hope?'

‘Well, almost . . .'

Jack detected my uncertainty. ‘What does that mean?'

‘He's still on police bail.'

Jack was outraged. ‘On bail? You mean they still think he might have something to do with it?'

I shrugged. ‘I don't know the details.'

Jane said, ‘They surely can't still think your father had anything to do with it. That's absurd.'

Jack, as always, had some good advice. ‘If I were you, I'd go and see them and find out what they're playing at. Tell them to get off their backsides and go and find the real killer. Tell them they're a useless bunch of good-for-nothings.'

I made out as if I were seriously considering this advice, all the while thinking that he clearly had never met Inspector Masson.

I went straight home and thence immediately to bed where I fell instantly asleep.

And was instantly awake some twenty minutes later as the phone rang.

‘Yes?' I admit now that I was rather short.

‘Lance?' It was Henry Lamb, one of the general surgeons at Mayday Hospital.

‘Henry, it's my half-day and I'm rather tired. Can't it wait?'

‘Your dad's been admitted.'

Which woke me up no end. I sat up, suddenly very, very alert. ‘What's happened?'

‘He's got a serious head injury. He's unconscious and the X-rays show a skull fracture.'

TWELVE

E
ven in those days Mayday Hospital was a busy place, the casualty department never seeming to empty, the nurses forever dealing with people crying or screaming with pain, vomiting, shouting or staggering around, not infrequently even verbally abusing them. I had done six months of house jobs there and I knew just what the staff were going through as I went up to Martha, a large, friendly but nonetheless formidable West Indian woman who staffed the reception desk.

‘Hello, Dr Elliot,' she said as I approached. She had just finished dealing with a man who had his hand wrapped in a bloodstained tea towel and who looked as if he were going to faint. Normally she would have had a huge grin on her face and her eyes would be sparkling as she tried to persuade me to marry her, but not today.

‘My father . . .?'

‘He's in side room number two.'

I walked in without knocking just as a short, plump nurse with bobbed brown hair was bending over Dad taking his blood pressure. She had a stethoscope in her ears and so didn't appreciate my entry, nor did she hear me express my surprise that they were not the only two people in the room.

Constable Smith was reading a tatty copy of the
Sun
as he sat in the corner beside a hand basin, one that he now peered over as he said, ‘Inspector Masson said I should wait here, just in case your father became conscious.'

‘Why?' It seemed a reasonable question but it got no answer, merely a forced smile.

I went over to Dad, disturbing the nurse who straightened up, initially with some annoyance. Dropping the bulb of the blood pressure cuff and taking the stethoscope out of her ears, she asked, ‘Can I help you?'

‘I'm his son. Dr Elliot.'

If I had hoped that my status as next of kin, and doctor to boot, would butter a few parsnips with her, I hoped in vain. She said severely, ‘You'll have to wait a moment until I've taken his blood pressure. He's on four-hourly obs.'

He looked awful. Because of his exuberant facial hair there wasn't much of his face that was visible, but what there was had a sickly hue, drained of life. He appeared to have lost weight already, as if he had been in a coma for months, not just hours. His head was tightly bandaged and in each forearm a cannula had been inserted; both were attached to a clear plastic bag that hung from a metal stand, crystal clear fluid in each.

The nurse completed her task, made a note of the result on the chart that hung from the metal frame at the end of the bed, then said, ‘There you are.'

‘What's his blood pressure?'

‘One-forty over ninety-five.'

It was high and that was not a good sign. ‘Has he shown any signs of regaining consciousness at all?'

She shook her head, then left quickly.

Which left me with Constable Smith. I couldn't work out why he was there. Was there some sort of danger to my father? I thought of what had happened when he had interfered in the deaths that had occurred on the allotments a few months ago, when he had again been brought into hospital unconscious . . .

‘What happened?' I asked.

‘I think you'd better to talk to the inspector about that.'

‘Is he in danger? Is that it?'

The constable remained silent.

‘What's going on? Why aren't you telling me anything?'

That got only a shrug. Rising frustration made me want to keep on at him, but I knew that it would be counterproductive. I asked tightly, ‘Where is Masson?'

At least he felt able to answer that one. ‘He's at Oliver Lightoller's house.'

It wasn't surprising and, with a terse ‘Right', I left the room. I thought that I had the right to know what had happened to put my father in a coma with his skull cracked, but before I uncovered the past, I wanted to know what the future had in mind. I went back to Martha's desk and waited for her to book in a young man with a crew cut, a lazy eye and a dart sticking out of his head; he didn't seem to be too bothered about this last, but was more concerned by the fact that Martha was black. She coped as she always did, by ignoring his hostility and remaining remorselessly cheerful. He didn't stand a chance.

‘What is it, Dr Elliot?'

‘Can you contact Henry Lamb?'

She picked up the phone and contacted Henry's secretary. Five minutes later, Henry came into Casualty. He wore a bright-red bow tie, check braces and commiserating smile as he came up to me, hand held out. He was slightly younger than me, a rising star in the surgical galaxy, his expanding private practice a testament not only to his abilities, but also his charm. ‘Lance. I'm so sorry. Have you been to see your father?'

I nodded. ‘He's stable at the moment.'

‘Good, good.' He had floppy brown hair and bright-blue eyes; the female patients fell in love with him as soon as they came round from the anaesthetic and found him inspecting their stitches. There was an awkward moment as he waited for me to ask the difficult questions and I waited for him to volunteer the answers. Into this the sound of an approaching ambulance siren began to make itself heard and I broke first.

‘What's the prognosis, Henry?'

I looked closely at his face and body language, and listened intently to his voice as he answered, on the lookout for the lies that all doctors sometimes have to tell. He took a deep breath in (not a good sign), then hesitated (another bad one), before saying, ‘Clinically, he's had quite a large bleed.'

‘What about surgical intervention?'

His expression became hesitant, even reluctant and I reflected that Dad was racking up the bad prognostic signs with alarming rapidity, but then he said, ‘I've been in contact with the chaps at Atkinson-Morley. They say they'll take a look at him.' Atkinson-Morley Hospital was the local neurosurgical centre, situated in a rather pleasant part of Wimbledon. Henry continued, ‘They've got a CT scanner and everything.'

I'd vaguely heard of it; it was some sort of fancy X-ray machine. ‘Will that help?'

‘Oh, yes. It allows them to see the soft tissues in the skull. It's a great help when planning neurosurgery.'

I couldn't see how it would work, but it wasn't the time for an in-depth discussion of novel medical technology. ‘When's he being transferred?'

‘Any time now. I've just been arranging the ambulance.'

Which was some comfort.

‘Do you have any idea how this happened?'

Perhaps it was because I was looking so closely at his body language that I spotted so easily that this seemed to cause him some discomfort. He noticeably stiffened, became almost embarrassed. ‘Don't you know?' he asked, but it was more by way of dissembling than because he wanted to know the answer.

‘No.'

‘Oh . . . Well . . .'

‘What's going on, Henry? No one wants to tell me how this happened.'

‘I don't know the details,' he began and, having done so, failed to continue.

‘But?'

‘But apparently he was found in his neighbour's house.'

Well, of course, Dad has two neighbours, and it was entirely possible that he had been visiting Leslie and Jasmine, two middle-aged ladies who lived together in perfect and (according to Dad, anyway) lesbian happiness, but I knew at once that that wasn't the case.

‘The Lightollers' house?'

‘Yes.'

I could tell by the way he said this that there was more. ‘What the hell was he doing there?'

Henry smiled but it wasn't the kind of smile that I wanted to see; it was a thing of sadness, of sympathy. ‘Well, the police seem to think that he was murdering Mrs Lightoller.'

THIRTEEN

M
y father's neighbours were well used to having their entertainment provided for free, because they could be fairly confident that, merely by looking out of their front-room windows at the right time, they would see something that would keep them talking and reminiscing for many hours. His car alone – a bright-red Hillman Avenger that sounded less like a means of road transportation and more like a Lancaster Bomber with smoker's cough – told you that here was no normal human being; when one added in the fact that he suffered from recurrent bouts of lunacy in which he indulged in various obsessions, then they need never be bored again.

It wouldn't have been so bad, had it not been Pollards Hill. Every town has a Pollards Hill; it's the place that, when you're young, your parents talk about in hushed tones, a place to aspire to when you're living in an end of terrace two-up, two-down and life's a bit of a drag. Such places are always infested with huge numbers of retired dentists, solicitors, chiropractors and military men, and these are people who can glower, tut-tut, head-shake and whisper like no others. They frequently had opportunity to do this with my father in their midst, but, that afternoon, the circus had really come to town.