Something Wicked (4 page)

Verity glanced up at him but said nothing.

The young doctor coughed. ‘Of course. I quite understand. I didn’t mean to suggest . . .’

‘Tell them what you have just told me, will you, Tomlinson,’ Dr Clement said brusquely. He was getting a bit fed up with this know-it-all young man. He had the reputation of being very clever in his field but Clement’s impression was that he was altogether too pleased with himself.

Tomlinson straightened his shoulders. ‘The bad news is, Miss Browne, that the X-rays show quite clearly a shadow on your right lung.’

‘And that means I have . . .?’

‘Pulmonary tuberculosis,’ Tomlinson finished her sentence and hurried on. ‘The good news, however, is that it is by no means a severe case. The lesion is small and should heal given rest, fresh air and a healthy diet.’

‘So I’m not going to die?’ Verity said, trying to smile.

‘We are all going to die,’ Tomlinson replied pompously, ‘but no, you should recover your health if you follow the regime I shall prescribe.’

‘How did she pick up TB?’ Edward asked. ‘I thought – to be brutal – it was a slum disease.’

‘From what you have told me, Miss Browne, of your time in Spain reporting the civil war, I have no doubt that you were exposed to disease on a daily basis.’

‘It’s true,’ Verity said weakly. ‘Many of the comrades fighting for the Republic were from the poorest backgrounds who for months on end were living in squalid conditions on a starvation diet. I used to smoke at least a packet of cigarettes a day because someone told me it would stop me catching anything.’

‘I’m afraid they were wrong,’ Clement said severely. ‘That’s just a myth. Wouldn’t you agree, Tomlinson?’

Tomlinson stroked his chin but refused to agree. ‘Maybe, but we know so little about what causes tuberculosis. Miss Browne, were your own living conditions in Spain very bad?’

‘Not really. For the most part we journalists lived in comfortable hotels.’

‘Hardly comfortable!’ Edward protested.

Verity wrinkled her nose. ‘I have to admit that one of the worst things about war is not so much the bullets as the smell. Spanish latrines are the sort you have to squat over and, what’s more, they all seem made of smooth stone – very slippery – and, of course, they were always blocked. I used to ask myself, how can we defend democracy against Fascism in such sordid conditions?’

There was a stunned silence. The men had never heard a well-brought-up woman discuss defecation so frankly and they felt profoundly uncomfortable. Finally, Tomlinson said, as though Verity had not spoken, ‘Well, somewhere along the line you came into contact with someone with infectious TB. Whoever it was coughed and disseminated small droplets containing the tubercle bacilli which you inhaled.’

‘And it took this long to show itself?’ Edward was indignant, as if he suspected that Verity had been played some underhand trick.

‘It can take a year or perhaps never. It is possible to have a mild infection and never be aware of it.’

‘You mean you can have the bacillus, or whatever it is, without any symptoms?’ Edward asked in disbelief.

‘Yes. In this case, however, Miss Browne suffered an acute episode of right pleuritic chest pain, fever and dyspnoea.’

‘Dyspnoea?’ Edward queried.

‘Difficulty in breathing,’ Clement explained.

‘And there is no medicine she can take?’ Edward appealed to his friend.

‘A course of colloidal silver and a few months in a Swiss sanatorium should do the trick. Mountain air . . .’

Verity and Edward looked at one another in dismay.

‘Months in a Swiss sanatorium!’ Verity was shocked into raising herself in her bed as if intending to walk out in protest.

‘Rest, fresh air and a healthy diet,’ Tomlinson repeated. ‘If you don’t follow my advice, I can’t be held responsible for the consequences.’

‘Tomlinson’s right,’ Clement said gravely. ‘You have to rest and put on weight. I know that for someone like you that’s not easy advice to follow but it is essential. We don’t want to lose you.’

‘After three months I will do more X-rays,’ Tomlinson added, ‘and then we’ll see.’

‘What will we see?’ Verity grumbled.

‘We’ll see if the lesion has healed or if . . .’

‘If I am going to die,’ Verity finished off his sentence for him.

After they had left Verity, Edward joined Dr Clement in Tomlinson’s office. ‘Man to man, Edward,’ Clement said, looking shifty, ‘there’s something I’ve got to say to you. You say that you and Miss Browne are engaged to be married?’

‘That’s correct,’ Edward agreed.

‘Well – and Tomlinson will back me up on this – pulmonary TB is very infectious. You must not get too close to her. You must not breathe her breath. You must not kiss her. Her sputum is chock-full of bacilli and . . .’ he coughed nervously and Tomlinson stared at his feet, ‘forgive me for saying this but on no account must you sleep with her if you don’t want to come down with TB yourself. You understand me?’

Edward’s first instinct was to be angry but what was the point? It was the duty of these two doctors to tell him the facts and they had discharged their duty.

‘I understand,’ he said with as much dignity as he could muster.

‘Now, as you know, Miss Browne cannot remain in this hospital. She presents a risk to other patients and staff. Until arrangements are made to take her to a sanatorium . . .’

‘I’ve thought of that,’ Edward interrupted. ‘I have a friend – someone I was up at Cambridge with as a matter of fact – who runs a sanatorium near Henley. A Dr Bladon. Do you know him?’

Clement’s face cleared. ‘Indeed, I do – a very good man. I was going to suggest his clinic to you myself. Don’t look so gloomy, Edward. The chances are she will make a full recovery. She’s not spitting blood . . .’ Edward went pale. ‘I’m sorry, but I know you don’t want me to hide things from you. As I say, as long as she gets no worse and is properly looked after, she will recover.’

Tomlinson made a moue of dissent. ‘Henley, you say? She ought to be in a Swiss sanatorium in the Alps or at least by the seaside.’

‘I think she would die of boredom,’ Edward broke in crudely. ‘She must be near her friends, her work . . .’

Edward appealed silently to Clement. He coughed. ‘Tomlinson’s right, of course, but I take your point, Edward. If her morale plummets then it may affect her physical health. Let’s give this a go . . . Bladon’s place, I mean. Then, if after three months her condition worsens . . .’

‘So be it, Clement, but don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ Tomlinson said, pursing his lips in disapproval.

Pride’s mention of Africa had given Edward an idea. When he got back to Albany, he went to his desk and retrieved a letter he had received a couple of weeks earlier from an old school friend inviting him to come and stay at the house he had just inherited in Henley of all places. He had been meaning to refuse but now he was glad he hadn’t. He lit a cigarette and read the letter again carefully. It might serve his purpose, he thought, but it was almost too convenient.

Harry Makin was back in England after years in Africa. In Nairobi, he had been something of a legend. One of the Muthaiga set, very good-looking, a first-class shot and a notorious heart-breaker. Always short of money, Harry survived by sponging off his women and taking parties of gun-crazy British and American tourists into the bush to blaze away at the wildlife. As Old Etonians, it was natural that they had chummed up when Edward had first gone to Kenya. Makin had shown him the ropes and they had shot game together until Edward began to tire of so much carnage.

Even at Eton Harry had been restless, adventurous, even foolhardy – a reckless gambler with a bottle of champagne always at his elbow to which the housemaster, who was much taken by Harry’s charm, turned a blind eye. Altogether a dangerous role model, he had led Edward into numerous scrapes, one of which had got him – in Eton jargon – ‘whacked by the head man’, caned by the headmaster, which had not gone down well with Edward’s father. In the end, Harry had been sacked for a relatively trivial offence – though perhaps banishment had been the outcome he sought – when his pet owl had mistaken his tutor’s hairpiece for a mouse and removed it in front of the whole form. Edward had not seen Harry again until he had bumped into him at Muthaiga Club on his first day in Nairobi.

For a time they were inseparable – as they had been at school – but Edward had gradually begun to see his friend for what he really was. Behind his charm, he was quite ruthless and yet, paradoxically, totally without ambition. There was nothing he really wanted to do. He delighted in stringing along several women at the same time – caring for none of them – and his parties were altogether too wild for Edward. Gambling, cocaine,
dagga
and morphine washed down with champagne and easy, meaningless sex was not Edward’s recipe for a good time. He thought his friend was driven by self-hatred and, unwisely, told him so. Harry called him a prude and a bore, after which they saw very little of each other. Of course, Edward continued to hear the gossip – how Harry had dropped in on a girlfriend in his Tiger Moth with a gift of cheetah pelts and then, taking to the air again, had gone straight on to see some other girl with an even more exotic gift.

It was in the air that both Harry and Edward found they were happiest. What could be more exciting than to fly at a hundred miles an hour over land marked on the map as ‘unsurveyed’? And to see not just one beast through the telescopic sights of a rifle but vast herds ranging over the land unchecked and untroubled by man – that was indeed something!

What at the time had seemed to be the final break came as a result of a car accident – quite a common event on Kenya’s unmade-up roads which, in the rainy season, could at a moment’s notice turn from desert track to foaming torrent. It was after dark and Edward was on his way back to Nairobi from a friend’s farm at Naivasha when he had seen a car coming down the potholed road towards him at high speed. It was obvious that the driver was under the influence of drink or drugs as the vehicle was swaying from one side of the road to the other, always on the point of going off the track altogether. The lights of Edward’s car must have disoriented the driver because, with a screech of brakes, the oncoming vehicle careered off into the undergrowth. Edward could hear the screams of the passengers and then a loud bang as the car hit a rock or a tree. Edward pulled off the road and, cursing, went to see what he could do to help. He had a lantern and was relieved to see that the other car had remained upright. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he thought the accident did not seem serious. Two girls were struggling out of the back seat and the driver, who Edward saw was Harry, appeared unhurt. He was leaning over a girl in the passenger seat who was slumped forward.

Edward knew her too. She was the wife of Lord Redfern – one of the leading figures in the colony.

‘You stupid bugger!’ Harry said as he looked up and saw Edward. ‘What in the hell did you think you were doing?’

Edward opened his mouth to protest but Harry had already turned back to the girl. ‘I say, can you feel a pulse?’

Edward put a hand to her neck but it was quite obvious she was dead. Her neck had been snapped like a twig by the impact.

It was a nasty business. The girl ought not to have been with Harry and there were plenty of witnesses to the fact that he had been drinking at the club before, on a whim, they all piled into the car ‘to go and see animals’ as the barman put it. Lord Delamere – the virtual king of the colony, a gnome-like figure with a protruding nose and small, piggy eyes – was not amused and his displeasure was one of the factors that made Edward decide to leave Kenya. Harry, however, had stayed on and had apparently succeeded in riding out the storm.

Now he was back in England and had invited Edward to stay at the barn of a place he had inherited from a distant cousin, along with a title. Edward had been doubtful about renewing the friendship but the fact remained that Harry – now Lord Lestern – lived just outside Henley which would be convenient for seeing Verity and as a base for ‘sleuthing’ as she had called it.

After a moment’s thought, he took out a sheet of writing paper before deciding it would be easier to explain the situation by telephone and ask his friend’s permission to use his house as a hotel from which to visit Verity. He could hardly keep disappearing to Bladon’s sanatorium without explaining where he was going so it was best to be quite open about why he wanted to come and stay.

‘By all means use the old place as a hotel,’ Harry had replied. ‘To tell the truth, it’s all been rather too quiet for my taste. People are such snobs. I tried to join Phyllis Court – know what I mean? The country club – but they took one look at me and froze me out. “Long waiting list”, “Try again in a couple of years” – that sort of thing. Maybe you can help me find a sponsor. I’m damned if they’re going to get away with saying Harry Makin ain’t good enough to join their rotten little club. I told them: I’m an Old Etonian and I’ve got a title and if I was good enough for Muthaiga, I ought to be good enough for a few hoity-toity stockbrokers.’ The snub had clearly hit a raw nerve. ‘The thing is I’ve been so long in Africa that I don’t know a lot of people in the old country so to have an old chum to stay would cheer me up. It’ll provide me with an excuse to give a few dinner parties, meet the neighbours – ingratiate myself with the local worthies. You won’t mind, will you?’

Edward groaned inwardly but all he could say was that he would enjoy meeting Harry’s neighbours. He comforted himself with the thought that he might pick up some gossip about the three ‘local worthies’ who had met such peculiar deaths.

Tomlinson wanted Verity to stay in hospital for two or three more days so he could complete his tests and, as Edward had some business to clear up in London, he arranged with Harry that he would drive down at the weekend, settle Verity in at Dr Bladon’s and then come on to Turton House. He told himself he would stay with Harry for a day or two and see how it went. He could always make some excuse to return to London if it didn’t work out.

Whether it was
knowing
what ailed her, Edward’s support and encouragement or her instinctive determination not to be defeated by the ‘bloody thing’, as she called it, but Verity very quickly recovered her spirits. In a couple of days, she was out of bed and pacing around her room like a caged animal saying she was better and wanted to go back to work. Tomlinson lectured her but he was already beginning to think that Dr Bladon might find it hard to keep her on the ‘straight and narrow’ as he called the regime he had prescribed.