Nor All Your Tears (3 page)

I was saved having to make further surprised noises by Max who, bless her, said, ‘Gosh! I'd never have guessed.'

Dad smiled proudly. ‘That's because he's changed.'

‘You've changed him,' she said, a sight too gushingly for my taste.

Before Dad could perjure himself with false modesty, a figure appeared in the doorway to the gym. I recognized him vaguely, which meant almost certainly he was a patient of the practice, although not registered with me, I thought. He was an inordinately tall and broad-shouldered man with cropped dark hair, unshaven features and the merest hint of a stoop as he poked his head out the doors to the gymnasium. ‘I'm locking up soon,' he pronounced in a deep voice. He spoke slowly, with care, as if words were a thing new to him.

Dad waved and smiled at him. ‘OK, George.'

The figure retreated. Dad explained, ‘The caretaker, George Cotterill. Nice chap. He sometimes helps out in the garden; we often have a cup of tea together.'

The evening was progressing as we trudged back towards the front of the school. Dad was apparently amongst the blessed in this life, for he had been given a parking space close to the school buildings (I noticed that the Mayor's reserved spaces were still empty, presumably because he had found something better to do with his evening – perhaps a statue to unveil or the freedom of Thornton Heath to convey upon someone), so we said goodnight to each other and Max and I began our expedition to the outer reaches of the known world where the car was parked. The sight of my BMW all alone, far from civilization, was slightly surreal; behind us, we could hear Dad turning over the engine of his bright red Hillman Avenger, the ‘Red Hornet' – a sound that the denizens of Pollards Wood, where he lives, were well used to.

A further five minutes passed before we were in the car and retracing the bumpy, dusty way back to the school entrance. The Red Hornet was still there, its bonnet up, Dad daring to put his head in its maw; I drew up beside him. ‘Problem?'

I made him jump so that he hit his head on the bonnet and nearly dislodged its support. ‘For God's sake!' he said, rubbing his forever disordered hair. ‘Do be careful, Lance.'

‘Have you got a problem?' I asked again, although it was obvious that he did.

‘Alternator's been misbehaving for a while now. I've been meaning to buy a new one, but kept putting it off; I thought this one would see me through a couple more journeys.' He sighed, ‘Apparently not, though.'

This was typical of Dad; he wasn't about to replace a part of anything until it was not only dead, but mouldering in the ground and all but an archaeological exhibit. ‘You'd better leave it here for the night, Dad. We'll give you a lift home.'

He hesitated, looking slightly shocked as if we had suggested leaving his ailing baby grandchild out on a hillside. ‘I suppose . . .' he said eventually.

‘It's getting dark, Dad. You can come back tomorrow and fit a replacement.'

It had probably been an easier decision when they decided where precisely to put the Iron Curtain, but he got there eventually. ‘All right,' he sighed.

As we drove off, I saw him looking back at the school gates as if grieving, a man separated from his spouse for the first time in years.

FIVE

T
he phone by my bed rang at six the next morning. I ought to be used to this kind of thing, but I'm not; in fact, as I grow older, I resent it more and more. I do a one-in-seven on-call rota, which ought to mean that I do a corollary six-in-seven not-on-call rota, but it doesn't seem to work like that. Believe me, I love my job and I really care about my patients, but one of the golden rules about medicine is never to let any of them get hold of your home number; if you do, you may just as well set your alarm clock to go off three times a night, every night.

‘Yes?'

‘Lance? Didn't get you up, did I?' My father once rang me at four in the morning because he'd lost his driving gloves and he thought he might have left them at my house. And (can you believe it?), his first words on that occasion were also, ‘Didn't get you up, did I?'

‘Well . . .'

‘Good. Look, can you give me a lift to the school? I want to pick up the car as soon as possible. I've promised to take Ada to Texas Homecare this morning and unless I get a move on, I won't make it.'

‘I didn't think you had a replacement; you said that you hadn't got around to buying one.'

‘I've been scouting about in the garage and found an old one. I'm sure it'll fit. No point in spending money when there's no need to.'

‘Dad, I'm due in surgery at eight thirty . . .'

‘Plenty of time to drive me over there, then. Can you pick me up in half an hour?'

Which was how, at just after seven, I drove again through the gates of Bensham Manor School, accompanied by a father who was so bloody cheerful, he made me want to scream. At least this time, Mr Hitler had apparently repaired to his underground bunker for a good night's rest before again imposing his will on the undisciplined masses. There was only one other car there, a Morris Minor which looked to be in almost perfect condition. Dad explained, ‘That's George's car. I expect he's opening up.'

After revelling in the illicit pleasure of parking in what last night had been the Mayor's parking space, Dad and I went across to his car and for the next fifteen minutes we wrestled with his alternator. I say ‘we' but in fact he quickly began to complain of a bad back (which was new to me) and made groaning noises every time he bent over the engine. Then he said he was having trouble undoing some of the bolts, and within a very short time it was I who was covered in grease and who was dirty (despite the fact that I was dressed for work), while Dad gave me oh-so-helpful advice and lots of negative encouragement (as in, ‘For God's sake, Lance, you'll never do it like that'). I had only just succeeded in getting the old alternator off when on the warm morning air there came a faint cry, one that came with weak, ill-defined echoes. I might have thought nothing of it, except that Dad said at once, ‘That sounded like George.'

It had come from the back of the school. Dad said in a worried tone, ‘He sounded as if he might be hurt.' And now I came to think about it, there had certainly been an anguished quality to the sound. He continued, ‘Perhaps we should go and look for him.'

I was sweating profusely, had seriously scuffed and dirtied hands, grease on my shirt sleeves and an oil spot on my tie; all I wanted to do was to get the new alternator fitted and rush back home to shower anew and get a change of clothes. ‘I'm sure he's all right.'

But Dad was already walking off. ‘He didn't sound it to me,' he said over his shoulder. I would have carried on with the car, but when I went to look for the new alternator, I discovered he had taken it with him. By the time I realized this, he was out of sight around the main building.

‘Dad?'

I hurried after him but when I rounded the corner he still wasn't in sight; I couldn't help wondering how a man with such a bad back could move so quickly. I heard him call out, ‘George? Is that you?' and hurried onwards. Around the next corner, I saw him stepping into the front doors of the gymnasium.

‘Dad?' He was already inside, though. I walked across the quadrangle to follow him, feeling all too familiar feelings of irritation.

Feelings which vanished completely as I entered the coolness of the foyer, for ahead of me, Dad was kneeling over a body lying just in front of the opened double doors of the main gymnasium hall. I rushed over to join him to discover that it was George. He wasn't unconscious, but he was a long way from being totally with it; in fact, my first thought was that he was drunk. Dad was feeling for a carotid pulse and had checked his pupils.

‘He seems just to have fainted,' he said.

‘Is he under the influence?'

Dad looked shocked. ‘George hasn't had a drink for twenty years. He's very proud of that.'

There was no obvious smell of alcohol, but I still wasn't absolutely convinced; at least not until I looked up and into the gymnasium hall.

‘Oh, shit.'

Dad looked up at me, frowning. ‘Please, Lance. There's never a need for language like that.'

Then he saw what I was looking at. ‘Oh, fuck,' he breathed.

The gymnasium was a large square space about fifty yards a side that could be separated into areas of various shapes and sizes by drawing across curtains suspended from the ceiling high above. The floor was marked out with plastic lines of varying colours into basketball courts, badminton courts, indoor cricket nets and two five-a-side football pitches; on the wall were scattered climbing frames and in the far right corner, close to the side door that led out to Dad's gardening area, there were thick climbing ropes, most of which were tied to suspension points on the wall so that they were out of the way.

One of them wasn't, though. One of them hung down, straight and true. One of them ended in a noose, and in that noose was a dead woman.

SIX

W
ell, it's Thornton Heath, isn't it? I mean, to most people it's just an anonymous place in South London that you might even not notice if you were in a hurry to get from Brixton to Horley, say; it barely registers on the radar for most people, but its citizens keep getting murdered. I am sure that in the future, people will say that it is a black hole of murder, a strange rift in the space-time continuum through which homicide seeps; or something to that effect. And, what is more, they keep getting murdered when I'm around. This, of course, is fascinating in and of itself – worthy, I think, of some sort of academic treatise – but it has certain unwanted effects on my life. The most acute and painful of these is that I come into regular contact with Inspector Masson.

It would be over-egging the pudding to say that he is my nemesis, but then he isn't top of the list for my desert-island buddies; he isn't even
on
the list; he isn't even on the reject list. He's on the list that also includes Benny from Crossroads, that bloody emu and Gary Glitter. He is small and grey and, well, not happy. Not happy, not contented, nor even, apparently, even merely disgruntled; he is as far from being gruntled as it is possible to get. He comes across as a fundamental force for grumpiness; he appears to see crime as a personal insult and, of course, murder as the most profane; that would be bad enough, but he does not take kindly to people trying to help him out of his grumpiness. I know nothing about him. I do not know if he is married or single, his age, where he lives or even if he is technically alive at all. On two previous occasions, I had attempted to help smooth his path through life, only to be met with less than enthusiastic gratitude; in fact, he had tended towards the contemptuous end of the spectrum, had even sometimes threatened me with prison for interfering with his enquiries.

And here we were again.

I knew enough not even to enter the gym when Dad and I had spotted its rather unpleasant exhibition, although I had had to hold Dad back, pointing out that the police would not be best pleased. ‘But we need to make sure that she's dead. And you're a police surgeon now.'

Which, although true, was not the point. The police invited me when they wanted me; it didn't work the other way round. I looked across at the gym's new exhibit. The body was suspended about four feet off the ground and under her was a pool of something that was undoubtedly drying blood; she had the clothing and the general build of the PE teacher I had seen the night before, but I couldn't be sure because her face had been fairly severely battered. ‘I don't think we need to worry too much about that, Dad . . .'

‘You've got to make sure, Lance,' he insisted and by golly, I suddenly realized he was right; I was first and foremost a doctor and, as terrified as I might be of Inspector Masson, I had a duty to check that she, whoever she was, was not still alive. It didn't take long, though. Her flesh was cold, waxen; her eyes (or, at least, what could be made out of them) were dried; her fingers were stiff. While Dad continued to tend to George (who was clearly in shock from what he had seen), I went at once to the small office where the PE teachers did whatever paperwork PE teachers have to do (presumably returns on numbers of pupils humiliated, ankles sprained, near-drownings in the swimming pool and cases of concussion following football practice) and dialled 999. The first police car arrived eight minutes later, two more straight after that, then an ambulance (who took over George's care) and Masson after another fifteen, accompanied by a woman I had never seen before; her age was difficult to judge, because her eyes looked wise, her skin young. She had the high cheekbones of a young Afro-Caribbean woman, and, I noticed immediately, impossibly perfect eyebrows. Her demeanour suggested more than a hint of detachment; it was as if she was constantly judging what she saw.

Their arrival coincided with Mr Silsby's, which made for an interesting spectacle.

Arthur Silsby had been a patient of our practice for far longer than I had been a doctor there. He had been born in the area and never moved except for teacher training; his first job had been at Bensham Manor and he was clearly going to work there until he retired or died (whichever came first). My impression of him had been that he was a kind and gentle man – clearly a good teacher – but a bit remote; if anything something of a martinet. He was quite close to retiring – near to sixty – perhaps six feet tall, thin with greying hair and one of those small tufty moustaches under his nose that is always a mistake; pre-Nazi Germany, I can see that some men might have thought it did something for their looks, but in the modern age, anyone considering facial hair of such a design should be taken into a corner and given a good kicking. Mind you, Mr Silsby would probably be able to give as good as he got; when he arrived to find his school full not of teachers and pupils – the police had been turning them away at the gate – but the boys in blue, he was not a happy headmaster; not happy at all. He demanded to know who was in charge, was pointed in the direction of my old mucker, Inspector Masson, and set to with a purpose, Masson's new woman friend looking on. He wanted to know what was going on, why the school was being closed without his permission, what gave Masson the right to take charge of a Local Education Authority establishment and why he, Arthur Silsby, had not been at least kept informed at home.