Second Opinion (22 page)

The landlord nodded. ‘In with his mates, he was. They were buying him drinks. Comforting him, like. Not that it helped. He was in tears after three Scotches and useless by the time he’d had four. Used to be able to hold his booze, old Dave, but this has knocked the stuffing out of him.’

Listening, George felt a twinge of sympathy for Dave Ritchard. The way he’d spoken to Harry had been dreadful, of course it had; but in his state of grief, and after growing up in these tight narrow streets where everyone shared the same hostilities and suspicious view of outsiders, especially the sort who could be easily identified by the colour of their skins, could he help his attitudes? Not entirely. But then she hardened. Not entirely meant that he could to an extent; and he had threatened Harry, after all. Her conviction that he was not involved with Harry’s death began to waver.

‘Did you see him leave?’ Gus was asking.

The landlord wrinkled his face in an effort of recollection. ‘It was dead busy last night. Busier than —’

‘So you told me before. Listen. Let me help you. Shut your eyes.’

‘Eh?’ The landlord looked like suspicion personified.

‘Don’t be any dafter than you can help,’ Gus said impatiently. ‘Do as you’re told and don’t argue. Now, shut your eyes. OK. It’s getting on for ten o’clock — No, keep them shut. Inside your head you’re looking, inside your
head. It’s last night and you’re looking inside your head at what’s going on here. See the clock?’

The landlord, standing with his eyes closed and looking absurdly like a devout if overgrown choirboy, much to the delight of some of his customers who were shamelessly watching and listening in, looked surprised. ‘Yeah, I can see it.’

‘OK. Now look round your bar. See who’s in tonight. Give me the run-down.’

The landlord kept his eyes closed and frowned. ‘Right. Yeah. Well, there’s Chalky over there with his dog. I told him before, next time that dog gets stepped on and makes a fuss is the last time it comes in here. Chalky, yeah. And then there’s a table of silly bits from the betting shop. It’s that Dawn’s birthday. Look at ‘em! Skirts up to their you-know-whats and about as much shame as Old Mother Riley’s tomcat. They’re chatting up some fellas I don’t know. They’ll know the girls well enough before the night’s out though. You can see they’re on to a good thing. Um …’

‘You’re doing fine,’ Gus said encouragingly. ‘Keep it up.’

‘There’s Dave Ritchard and he’s got the Garnett fellas with him.’

‘Brothers?’ said Gus.

‘No, they’re cousins, those two. Come from over Plaistow way. Old mates of Eric Phillips and Les Lincoln. They’re there too.’

‘Ah,’ said Gus softly. ‘I know them.’

‘Dave’s nearly paralytic. I’ll have to send him off soon. But Eric’s looking after him all right. Then there’s that Paki, all dressed up and nowhere to go.’

‘Paki?’

The landlord opened his eyes briefly. ‘The one that got done,’ he said and then closed his eyes quickly as Gus opened his mouth to react.

‘He’s talking to someone,’ the landlord said. Gus closed his mouth and listened intently. ‘I can’t quite see …’

‘You never mentioned Harry talking to anyone before,’ Gus said.

‘You never asked. Anyway, I’ve only just remembered. Sort of. It’s like I’m looking at him … yeah. He’s definitely talking. Waving his hands about.’ The landlord’s face suddenly lifted and he opened his eyes wide and stared at Gus. ‘Here, hang about a bit! This bloke — he’s left. I mean, he went out with this other one, the one he was talking to. He went out, following, and there’s Dave.’ He closed his eyes again quickly and stared inside his lids at this memory. ‘Yeah, there it is! I can really see it, like! Dave Ritchard’s sitting there as pissed as a man can be and still alive, not fit to walk as far as I can tell, and your bloke’s gone.’

He opened his eyes finally. ‘So, if you were thinking it was Dave went for that bloke, it wasn’t, because he was still here after the bloke walked out. And I reckon he still was when that bird what found the Paki came running in here shrieking her head off. I mean, even if he
could
have gone after him to the car park, he wasn’t in no state to walk, take it from me. So, there you are. It’s amazing what you can remember when you have to, ain’t it?’ And he looked at Gus with huge self-satisfaction.

16
  
  

‘You win,’ Gus said. ‘Dave Ritchard’s out of it. Not that I won’t be keepin’ a close eye on him. The way that bloke talked, he’s dangerous. I’ll see to it that the race relations group here keep an eye on him too.’

He stretched and yawned, then settled back into a comfortable posture at his desk. George watched him from her seat in the battered armchair he kept in the corner of his office, listening to the sounds that came from the busy police station beyond his glass door, and felt absurdly happy. A puzzling case, Christmas coming, and Ma here (and for all her irritations and problems she
was
dear old Ma). George tried not to add in the last and most obvious reason for feeling as she did, that she was with Gus, who was getting more and more important to her. That was a complication to her life she really didn’t want to think about too much.

‘Can we do a sort of recap?’ she said. ‘Go over what we’ve got — see where it takes us?’

‘If you like.’

‘Questions first, though. Have you any more on the Oberlander baby?’

‘Not a bloody thing.’ He looked petulant, sticking his lower lip out like a sulky child. ‘Dammit all, you’d think
it’d be easy enough to find out what baby’s disappeared from where, wouldn’t you? Neighbours are mostly very nosey when it comes to kids and they notice if they vanish, but I’ve put a check out to every nick in the country, and no one reports any kid like this. There are missing children all right, but no babies. Certainly not any sick ones that look much younger than they are.’

‘There’s a bit more to this one than that,’ she said. ‘He had AIDS.’

He stared at her. ‘You didn’t tell me that before.’

‘Wasn’t sure. Prudence Jennings was the one who put the idea up. She said she thought he might be HIV positive. I’ve only just got the last test results through. He was HIV positive but he also had clear evidence of opportunistic disease, so AIDS has to be the diagnosis. Damn.’ She bit her lip then. ‘I feel a certain twinge of guilt here. I should have told Prudence Jennings.’

‘Oh?’ He looked puzzled.

‘She asked me to do the tests. I did the first ones and went back to tell her, but by then the child had vanished, and she wasn’t there herself, either. And after it died and I’d done the PM, the whole case was over and done with — sort of — I didn’t go back or try to reach her any other way. I have to admit I didn’t think of it. She’s entitled to know, though.’

‘Why?’ He looked genuinely interested.

‘Well, it’s the right thing to do, you know. Colleagues should co-operate. And as I say, it was she who put the idea of HIV infection into my mind in the first place.’

‘I see.’ Gus looked judicious. ‘You know, I think maybe I’ll have a word with her too.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, it’s this business of her being away and leaving young Harry when she was supposed to be on call. Maybe there’s a link there somewhere.’

‘With Harry’s death?’

‘Well, maybe. Let’s face it, ducks. We’ve proved he wasn’t killed by a bunch of racist yobs, haven’t we? You found out from your PM and I found out from my questioning. That means that someone else killed him. Who? Since he had few if any connections outside the hospital, as far as I can find out from the interviews we’ve done so far, it has to be someone inside. So why not your Prudence? Maybe there was something going on between them. Maybe she set him up for someone else to lure him to the Rag and Bottle and organized for him to be run over. Maybe Prue herself ran him over.’

George shook her head. ‘Hardly. The landlord at the pub said Harry was talking to a bloke.’

‘Did he?’ Gus said. ‘Are you sure?’

She blinked. ‘How do you mean? Didn’t he?’

Gus flipped open his notebook. ‘Let’s see, now. Here we are. Um — “He’s talking to someone … Waving his hands about”. No, hang on, it’s further on. Ah, here we are. “He’s left. I mean, he went out with this other one, the one he was talking to. He went out, following …”‘ Gus closed his notebook and stowed it back in his pocket. ‘So there you are. It could have been Prudence, couldn’t it?’

‘You said you were going to get a description from him. Did you?’

‘We did. And it doesn’t help. I can remember it — it was in Urquhart’s notebook though, because he did the checking on that. I was just listening and looking over his shoulder. Let me see.’ He closed his eyes, waited a moment and then said, ‘Jeans. Blue anorak. Trainers. Woolly hat in green and orange stripes pulled down over the ears. Medium height and build. Not very much of anything, really.’ He opened his eyes again and grinned at her. ‘See what I mean? It could ha’ been a woman, couldn’t it? At a pinch.’

George was staring at him, fascinated. ‘You’ve got an eidetic memory too,’ she said almost accusingly. ‘You never told me that!’

‘So? You’re not the only one! I’ll bet there’re lots of people can remember like that.’

‘Shutting their eyes and seeing it all over again, right? The way I do. The way I did when we were doing the Oxford case.’

‘The way I made the landlord do it. It’s not all that difficult, after all. I have to admit I was impressed when you did it, though, so I thought I’d try and see if I could too. And I found out I could. What is it you called it? Eidetic? All I know is I’ve been practising calling up pictures of what I’ve seen in my mind and sort of reading them off, and I’ve managed to show other people — a few of ‘em — how to do it, too.’

She grinned, suddenly elated. ‘It’s great, isn’t it? I used to pass most of my exams that way. Sort of call up the memory of my notebooks and look at the pages and read off the answers. Just like a crib.’

‘I’m not as good at it as you are. I can still remember being gobsmacked by the way you managed to remember everything that had been in that bloke’s bathroom cabinet. Amazin’. It made me want to be the same.’

She laughed. ‘OK. Is there anything else you can remember now that might help with this recap?’

‘Ah! Back to our muttons, eh? Fair enough. Let’s see what we’ve got.’ He began to tick off on his fingers: ‘Item, three babies dead of cot deaths in Old East.’

She frowned. ‘Look, I don’t want to seem argumentative so early in the proceedings, but what have they got to do with these two murders? They were just cot deaths.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Like you, I’m bothered by that note someone put on the PM request form — even more bothered by the fact that you can’t find out who wrote it. So maybe they were murders. You said yourself it’s hard to tell with these infants what they died of. Smothering shows no signs, and —’

‘Sometimes it does!’

‘Yeah, but it doesn’t always. So that’s enough to make a mystery, right? They could have been deliberate deaths.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said slowly. ‘But I’ve got a deep hunch those babies died naturally, somehow. It was just a fluke there were so many — though I have to agree the note’s a puzzle.’

‘OK. So we’ll include them in our recap. I put them at the top of the list, not because they’re the most important element but because they happened first. Then we have a baby with AIDS fetched into Old East in mysterious circumstances, who disappears and is then found smothered in a plastic bag on a piece of waste ground. I think we’re entitled to regard that one as a right oddity.’

‘Yes,’ she said gravely. ‘I won’t argue about that one, though we didn’t have the definitive AIDS diagnosis till after the PM, of course.’

‘Don’t pick nits. So, where was I?’

‘Putting the Oberlander baby on the list.’

‘Right. Then we have Harry Rajabani’s murder. This one really is a bit tricky. I still can’t help wanting to think about the racial motive. Not because I’m obsessed,’ he added hastily, seeing her expression. ‘But because of the link, tenuous though it is, between the blokes who went for Choopani and bashed in my window while they were at it, and Harry.’

‘What link?’ she demanded. ‘Just the fact that Choopani and Harry weren’t white?’

‘The blokes who went for Choopani were the same ones who were Dave Ritchard’s mates. Some of them were in the pub with him last night, even though the landlord is adamant they couldn’t have got out to the car park to do it while Harry was there. They
were
in the pub though. And there are one or two other tie-ins. Choopani was the GP who sent Kevin Ritchard to Old East in the first place. Though what Dave was doing on the list of an Asian GP, with his views, Gawd only knows.’

‘The local GPs run a rota on-call service for each other,’ George said. ‘It’s cheaper for them than hiring locums when they’re off duty. They each take a turn at covering for all each other’s calls. It could be that Choopani got to see Kevin that way, and spotted something his own GP missed.’

‘Fair enough. So there are other links, you see, between Harry and Choopani via Kevin, and between Dave and Choopani’s heavies.’

‘But no links with the Oberlander case and certainly none with my cot deaths.’