Night Visit (19 page)

17

Another tired night on call. Another bleep. Another message. Another plea for help.

And
this time it was from Danny Small.

I
could have left it. I would have been perfectly justified. We don’t have to go to violent patients. We have a choice. We can divert them to the local casualty or we can opt for a police escort. I chose the police escort because
I
wanted
to go.

Don
’t question why.

I
checked my battered bag for equipment. It was complete. The nurse had restocked it with missing drugs. I waited outside my front door for the constable to arrive.

Not
PC Harper this time but a burly young thing of less than twenty who answered to the name of Wagstaff. PC Wagstaff. I never did know his Christian name. He was as tall as a tree with long, dangling arms.

And
he looked dubious. ‘You’re sure you want to go on this? I know you’ve had some trouble.’

‘
Absolutely sure. I’m a doctor, Police Constable Wagstaff. I have a duty of care.’

He
still looked unhappy. ‘You could just call an ambulance,’ he said.

‘
Oh no. I want to go. You see, I know Danny.’

The
words would be used later against me.
‘The
doctor
said
she
wanted
to
go
.
’
And
he
would
add
,
‘Yes
,
I
did
think
it
strange
,
especially
under
the
circumstances
.
’

Wagstaff
still looked unhappy as though he sensed something was not quite right.

‘
Do you want to come in the squad car, Doctor?’

‘
Oh no,’ I said. ‘I’ll drive myself. You follow.’

I
caught him looking at me with a troubled expression as I switched my engine on.

Danny
lived in a hostel, a well-known place to both myself and PC Wagstaff, a narrow, terraced house in a backstreet of Larkdale. All the occupants had their rents paid by the Social Services, their drugs supplied by Substance Abuse. They had virtually all they needed. Drugs, fags, money, food. In that order. But it was never quite enough.

The
door was tugged open by a girl with wild, dry hair. She saw the police uniform and made a face. ‘Yeah?’

I
stepped from behind Wagstaff to take control. I’m the doctor,’ I said crisply. Pale eyes widened. Like the magic words, Open Sesame, the door swung open.

‘
Tell me what’s happened?’

‘
I dunno,’ she said with a swift glance back at the uniform.

I
kept my voice low. ‘My only chance of doing any good is if I know the truth. What’s he taken?’

Something
very like fear licked her eyes and without another word she led the way up the dark stairs filled with sweet, sickly air. PC Wagstaff sniffed stagily. ‘Nice air freshener, love.’

She
stopped right there, halfway up the claustrophobic staircase. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘It’s called Opium.’

Give
Wagstaff his due, his feathers were perfectly unruffled. ‘I thought it was,’ he said, and we finished our journey two flights up in the attic room by which time I had worked it out. This was probably the bitch who had given Danny his fake alibi and robbed me of a rightful conviction.

I
said nothing but I noticed she made no attempt to enter the garret but hung back in the doorway as Wagstaff and I entered.

Vomit
not only has different sounds but it has different smells to the practised nose. Danny had been vomiting bile over the one object in the room, a heap of blankets. This was where Danny lived, in this dingy rat hole. I used my torch. One quick look at fixed, dilated pupils and I knew for once in his brief life Danny had had enough. Correction. This time Danny had had too much. I shouted in his ear, jabbed a needle into his skin to test his consciousness level. He didn’t even feel that. He was far away. I looked up at the girl for explanation.

‘
He got it from the doctor’s bag,’ she said sulkily. ‘He got the pure this time.’ I could have sworn there was a note of envy in her voice.

‘
You bloody idiot,’ I said. ‘You lot never learn, do you? The stuff you get on the streets is something like twenty per cent—if that. He’s OD’d.’ From my bag I drew up the Narcan, instructed Wagstaff to squeeze Danny’s arm, found a vein and shot it full of the antidote to his sad little habit. Wagstaff used his radio to summon an ambulance and we heard it tracking down the High Street. Danny was no longer my problem. In fact I didn’t even wait for them to man-handle him down the stairs and into the van but went straight home.

I
had had enough drama for one day.

*

On that Saturday Duncan rang me. ‘You said you were interested in fungi,’ he said. ‘I noticed a lovely fairy ring in the field near the Heron Pool. Why don’t you and Rosie come for a walk? I can point some of them out. It’s a good time of year. Most fungi are at their best. A couple of weeks, Harry, first frosts and they’ll all be gone.’

I
was glad of the invitation. Rosie had been significantly quieter since Robin’s brief forage back into family life. I’d heard nothing since. Not even the traditional bunch of red roses. I would have liked some red roses. Surely I had earned them. But nothing, and I knew that Robin, with acute perception, had sussed me out. He knew I had finally risen above my involvement with him. I was cast free. Maybe his ego had finally been dented. Who knew? Without contact I had no idea. For me I did not care. But for Rosie I was furious. Now love and involvement had finally withered and died I could even dislike him for his neglect of his own flesh and blood.

Of
course there was always one explanation I could cling on to. Perhaps, just perhaps, he had decided to make no attempt to influence my decision. Of all the explanations it was the one I liked most.

So
Duncan’s chatter was doubly welcome. ‘And besides the champignon, there was a lovely patch of
Amanita
virosa
not far from the Heron Pool, you know. You might even have noticed it.’

‘
Sorry?’ The name was foreign to me, foreign and yet familiar.

‘
Amanita
virosa
,
’
he said. ‘The second deadliest fungus growing in the British Isles. A fry-up with some of these would probably kill you or at least give you stomach cramp, vomiting. You know. Pretty typical symptoms. They call it the Destroying Angel.’

18

Sometimes it takes a few days for bad news to filter through to us so that weekend I was ignorant. I had assumed that Danny would be admitted, the antidote already taking effect. He would be healed and counselled and the round of the Substance Abuse Unit, methadone supply and petty crime would continue. I did not know that, like Amelia Pritchard, he too had dropped out of the dance.

I
was unsuspicious as I drove towards the Heron Pool, anticipating a brisk walk through the wood on a bright, autumn morning. But even this innocent forage would assume significance.

Duncan
had been waiting for us, already leaning against the stone parapet as I had pulled the car into the field entrance, hoping I wouldn’t get stuck. The mud looked soft. Rosie leapt out of the car, as energetic as a puppy. And I noticed that she hugged Duncan and greeted him with uncharacteristic familiarity, linking her arm through his.

‘
Hello there,’ she said. ‘I hope you’re going to show us some really poisonous funguses.’

I
winced. I’d been telling her all last night that the plural of fungus was not funguses.

Duncan
corrected her gently and she laughed. ‘I know what Mummy told me,’ she said, ‘but I was thinking about it all last night and it jolly well ought to be funguses. So that’s what I decided to call them.’ She gazed at both of us in turn with a challenging look.

I
suppressed my laugh because I admired this childishly logical yet confident statement. But underneath I was concerned. This was an unfamiliar Rosie and it struck me that maybe she wanted her father so much she welcomed any male approach. She hardly knew Duncan yet she was chattering easily to him.

He
didn’t seem to mind but took hold of Rosie’s hand while we skirted the Heron Pool to find the path that cut through the trees. At first I was hardly listening as Duncan explained how a fungus obtains its nutrients from rotting vegetable matter. I was too busy absorbing the early morning scene to pay much attention to his slow, didactic words. The sun was barely up, casting a thin light across fields that steamed with chilly, early morning mist. And I was distracted by my thoughts. Apart from the fact that this was late autumn instead of hot summer this must have been how it was the morning that Melanie Carnforth disappeared. She too had vanished into the early morning mist. It would have been quiet here, like this morning, silent between the trees apart from Birdsong, distant dogs barking, distant cars droning along the road. There would have been no one around. Except her killer. I peered through the trunks of trees, too close together for a clear view, mist deceiving me into imagining I could see something that couldn’t be there.

They
were yards ahead of me, he talking in the gruff, pedantic voice. And then I started listening to what he was saying.

‘
Fungi, Rosie,’ he laughed again, ‘or funguses if you want to be incorrect’—I thought it very neat: while acknowledging her right to pervert a word he was, gently, and non-confrontationally, correcting her—’obtain their food by digesting organic matter.’

‘
Animals, do you mean?’ Rosie’s clear voice piped up. But the phrases had whipped up the vision. A fairy ring growing above the dead body, rotting animal matter. A fungus that fed on the body of the dead child.

With
the instinct of a whippet Duncan must have sensed something strange in me. He glanced back. ‘You all right there, Harry? Not going too fast for you, are we?’

And
Rosie’s merry rejoinder. ‘Oh come on, Mum.’

I
watched them hand in hand as though they were part of that vision. I must keep up.

I
had dressed Rosie in blue jeans and her scarlet anorak. I had a sudden, vivid vision of the woman she would one day become. It was strange. Robin was blessed with attractive, regular features, I with irregular ones. Rosie looked like neither of us yet sometimes Robin would flit across her face as though his shadow fell there. I knew I would love the woman she would become, the woman Melanie Carnforth had never had the chance to be. So I watched my daughter as though I was her shepherd as she and Duncan scrambled through the trees, peering into heaps of leaves, running and shouting as though they were both children. And Duncan called out the names, Latin and colloquial. They were such wonderful names. Death Cap. Blusher. Fly Agaric. Toadstool.

‘
Don’t lick your fingers,’ he warned as she bent to touch something and I caught up and peered over his shoulder at a white, mushroom-like fungus on a spindly stem.

‘
This is it,’ he said triumphantly. ‘The Destroying Angel,
Amanita
virosa
.’

But
I saw more than the slim, white, mushroom shapes. Broken stalks. Some had been harvested. Pritchard.

The
scribbled words I had interpreted as being a woman’s name,
Anita
, had been a clever diagnosis from a country doctor. He had known as I knew that Rupert Pritchard had died after eating these. Whether picked by his wife or his son, the dish had been prepared deliberately. And Amelia Pritchard? I would stake my reputation that she had died from the exact same cause. Either a suicide or a murder.

‘
Duncan,’ I said softly. ‘What happens if you’—the thought struck me like a hammer:
she
had not come out here to pick them because she was incapable. They had been picked for her—‘are fed these?’

‘
Whew.’ He whistled through his teeth. ‘The usual. Nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, hallucinations, death.’ He glanced at Rosie. She was listening hard. ‘Not pleasant,’ he said, ‘so don’t touch.’

Rosie
squeaked. ‘Oh, horrible things,’ she said and swung her wellie towards them.

‘
No.’ Duncan stopped her. ‘No. They have as much right as we to this earth. As much right as a bee or a wasp or even an adder.’ His eyes were fixed on me. ‘As much right as Danny Small.’

‘
What’s a Danny Small?’

He
was still watching me. ‘A rather sad person,’ he said and I felt uncomfortable. This was a coded message for something but I did not know what.

My
mind was still too full of the Destroying Angel to give the matter much attention. I thought I knew it all. The devil spawned its own young. His father had been violent. Mother and son had stayed silent, stuck together in their crime. Amelia Pritchard had kept her mouth shut about her husband’s death for nearly fifty years. No great struggle then to keep mum about an unknown child for only ten. She would have stuck by her son with the same dogged, blind loyalty that had prevented her from telling me the truth the night she had fallen. Knowing her son was guilty she had still shielded him—again.

‘
Harriet,’ Duncan and Rosie were waiting for me. We moved on, climbing over fallen, rotting tree stumps, finding Orange Peel and Witches’ Butter, a huge Beefsteak Fungus just like the one that grew on the rotting tree stump which marked the spot where Melanie Carnforth had climbed over the fence.

‘
Look here. What a find.’ Duncan’s voice penetrated with the quick words of an enthusiast. ‘Fly agaric.’ He and Rosie knelt in the damp leaves to take a closer look.

I
too peered at the red and white spotted fungus but it was another, more disturbing vision that formed in my mind. It was not clear, very fuzzy in parts but the main ingredients were there, almost visible. The child in the fly agaric dress, the man who held her hand and promised to show her fairy rings and toadstools. The child would instinctively have trusted such a man. She would have gone with him, slipping her hand into his, as was Rosie now.

Melanie
Carnforth had never seemed so close.

Reuben
’s voice whispered hoarsely in my ear. ‘Help me, Doctor. Help me.’ He had wanted me to find both her body and her killer.

I
ran after them. ‘Don’t go so fast. Wait for me. Please?’

Rosie
turned, irritated and I knew she was comfortable with Duncan. But I was beginning to understand things.

Instinct,
superstition, call it what you like.
I
knew
.

He
had held her by the hand, pretending to be her friend.

The
vision stayed clear right through the walk and the lunch later with Fiona and Merryn. In fact it stayed with me for the whole weekend. By Monday I felt I would burst unless I spoke to someone about it. And Neil seemed ideal.

I
found him in his surgery well before our first patients had arrived. But his eyes were very hostile as I blurted out the garbled story, knowing that to him it must have sounded worse than muddled, crazy. Toadstools and poisonings, a murdered child whose body the entire Larkdale police force had been unable to find. And here was I telling him not only that I knew how the child had been tempted beyond the boundary her grandparents had set but that the spot was marked by a fairy ring.

He
frowned at me. ‘What on earth are you saying?’

I
cast around for something tangible to bear me out. ‘I sent Amelia Pritchard’s vomit away for analysis.’

‘
Not about that, Harriet,’ he said impatiently. ‘The little girl who vanished. How the hell do you know what happened?’

‘
I just know it, Neil.’

‘
So why didn’t the police locate the body? They must have searched the forest thoroughly. It’s the obvious place.’

‘
I don’t know,’ I said.

‘
Hmm.’ He looked unimpressed. ‘It beats me, Harry, why you’re so obsessed with something that happened so long ago.’

‘
Reuben asked me to help him.’

Neil
looked cross. ‘You don’t think he might have been asking you to help in a terminal illness? For goodness’ sake, Harriet. You were his doctor. Not a detective. If you know something tell the police. If not shut up before you find yourself in front of the courts as well as the General Medical Council. I can’t understand you taking such risks. It’s vastly unprofessional. Duncan and I will be very unhappy if you pursue this matter—for whatever reason.’

‘But
they never caught him.’

‘
Oh.’ His face cleared. ‘So you’re still certain it was Pritchard?’

I
nodded. ‘And now he’s got a job at the school.’

‘
Speak to the headmaster then.’

‘
I did.’ I recalled the headmaster’s look of hostility as I had related my observations. Worse, I remembered Jay Gordon’s expression of dislike. In Larkdale, it seemed, the citizens preferred to forget than to know.

‘
And what do you propose doing about all this?’ Neil’s eyes were already wandering towards the buzzer and his overflowing basket of notes.

I
stood up. ‘I’m not going to rest, Neil. The man is a danger.’ I felt my voice match his face with hostility. ‘Don’t you read your papers, Neil? Paedophiles are never to be trusted again. Not ever. They are never safe.’

His
eyes dropped. He had the manners not to let me read the alienation he was feeling. ‘Even ten years later? And he’s clean.’

‘
What about his mother? She would have known, you see.’

‘
Harriet,’ he said wearily, ‘you have no proof. The woman almost certainly died of acute gastroenteritis. And if what you told me about the filth around that place is true I’m really surprised she survived for so long without getting gut rot.’

‘
I shall prove that first,’ I said, ‘before I make it my business to clear Reuben Carnforth’s name and find the body of that poor child so Vera can eventually be at peace.’

Neil
looked almost sorry for me. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘it’s been a shocking year for you, Robin and all that.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘Now don’t take this the wrong way but you need a rest.’

The
worst thing was I could read his mind.

He
had all but told me I was having a nervous breakdown, or to put it in neater, medical terms, acute anxiety and depression leading to psychosis.

He
thought
I
was
mad
.

I
left the room knowing that whereas Neil and I might have been friends, now we were uneasy partners. I thought I had reached rock bottom in his estimation. I had further to fall.

The
last thing I needed was to have Fern on the phone to say that Anthony Pritchard had shown up at the surgery and was demanding to speak to me.

I
was tempted to make him wait until the end but even knowing he was in the building was enough to disturb me. I could no longer concentrate. Feeling defeated I picked up the telephone. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to send him in.’

This
time I did hear his footsteps approach. Pritchard was angry. Not tentative now. His knock was a loud rap. And he walked in without waiting for me to call him in.