Stanley and the Women (14 page)

‘That’s
what I figured, so I got straight in the lift and asked around. It didn’t take
me long. Anyway, how is Steve?’

‘How
long have you known him?’

Up to
this point she had seemed not to be giving me her full attention. She had kept
glancing at, or towards, the photographs and other cuttings that were pinned to
the cork runner on the wall by the desk, most of them scattered with
handwritten comments. They would have been very largely unintelligible or at
best uninteresting to anyone outside a narrow local circle, and even I could
have spared a few of them. Now she tore herself away from all that and faced me
more squarely. ‘I don’t see that matters much either,’ she said, and I put her
down as probably West of England.

‘What
are you doing here? Why didn’t you ring me up?’

‘Look,
Mr Duke, all I want to know is how Steve is. That’s not classified information,
is it?’

‘Of
course not. He’s … all right. A bit under the weather but nothing serious,’
I said without thinking. ‘Why? What have you heard about him?’

‘Oh, is
there something to hear?’

Across
the room Morgan put his phone back. I went over to him and said, ‘Look, Taff,
could you lose yourself for a few minutes?’ I was hazy about why I wanted him
to do that — I had no theories to speak of about Trish Collings, if that was
her name, except that she was not what she said she was, but even so
embarrassment of some sort could safely be predicted. If in due course she came
at me with a razor I could call for help from the dozens of people within hearing,
run away, etc. Still no secretary, a temporary who was going the right way
about making herself even more so than had been agreed in the first place.

Morgan
had done quite a good job for him on hiding his astonishment at my request. ‘Sure,’
he said. ‘Er … sure.’ By the way his eyes flickered I could tell he was
starting to wonder too.

‘Have
you tried him?’

He
cottoned on to that instantly — no trouble with anything like that. ‘Not
reachable, but somewhere in the building, so we’re getting warm. I left a
message.’

‘Great.
Well …’

The
sudden quiet reminded him that he had undertaken to leave. ‘Er … see you
later,’ he said, and went out at a near-run.

I
started on the female again. ‘Now. Who
are
you?’

‘Mr
Duke, why all this fuss about a simple inquiry after somebody’s welfare? What’s
the matter?’

She
spoke, as she had done from the start, in a reasonable tone, in fact with
slightly overdone reasonableness. By now we had had quite enough time to finish
looking each other over. The female was not all that much younger than Nowell
after all, with good features except for that thin mouth, which had something
wrong about its shape or perhaps the way she moved it in speaking. I thought
there had been sexy bits in her expression part of the time, to show she might
be interested in me and inquire whether I might be interested in her, but it
was hard to be sure of that because she moved her mouth about even when she was
keeping quiet, and also kept shifting her eyes to and fro. Her face was never
still. That meant I had no chance of telling whether she was attractive either.
What she was mostly looking at was a not very large man with a rather small
moustache, probably with a suspicious, hostile look as well and certainly with
the nearest he could manage to a deep-frozen eunuch’s one.

‘State
and authenticate your identity in the next ten seconds,’ I said, quite enjoying
this part, ‘or I’ll call Security and have you buzzed out.’

‘What
are you so afraid of?’

‘Plenty
of things, thanks, and one of them’s that you might be off your head whoever
you are.’

‘Ah,’
she said as though she had won a bet with herself.

‘Ah?
Two seconds.’ I moved towards the phone. ‘Sorry about the script.’

‘All
right, you can call off the panic, I’ve got what I wanted,’ she said, still a
good deal more mildly than the way I had gone on from the start. ‘My name is
Trish Collings, and I’m helping to look after Steve at St Kevin’s.’

‘He is
all right, is he?’

‘No
cause for alarm.’

‘Nurse,
are you? Or doctor or what?’

‘I am a
doctor, yes. So —’

‘I
thought a Dr Abercrombie was supposed to be in charge of his case.’

‘Dr
Abercrombie suffered a small heart attack a few days ago. He’ll be off work for
at least a month.’

‘So are
you in charge of Steve?’

‘I don’t
like that phrase, it has the wrong implications, but yes, I am a senior
psychiatrist.’

‘Really.
What identification have you?’

‘Oh,
for Christ’s sake.’ She unzipped what looked like a man’s black
imitation-leather sponge bag and turned through it.

‘I’d
just like to be on the safe side if it’s all the same to you,’ I said, I had
meant to sound indignant and rather grand, but it came out apologetic. As I
spoke I realized I felt it too, and could not quite see why, except there we
were and Dr Collings was a woman.

After a
moment she passed me a letter addressed to the person she claimed to be, even
down to the Trish. It was from the librarian of the British Psychiatric
Association, which somehow worsened things slightly for my side. By this time I
was fighting hard not to say I was sorry, also wondering whether my uneasy
feelings at the sight of her were all accounted for now.

‘You
didn’t give me much of a chance, did you?’ I said as I handed her back the
letter. ‘What am I supposed to think when a strange female barges in …

I had
lost her — something in or about the letter had caught her attention. She
peered short-sightedly at it while I remembered that the book it referred to
had been called
The Parenthood of Madness
and started feeling uneasy
again. Then, taking her time, she folded up the single sheet and pushed it back
into her sponge bag. ‘Sorry?’ she said.

‘Nothing,
I was just —’

‘I
know, I shouldn’t have done it really, but it sometimes helps to catch people
off their guard.’

‘I see,
yeah. Has it helped this time?’

At this
piece of repartee she shook her head in a way I thought was more preoccupied
than negative — I noticed that whichever it was none of her hair moved. At the
same time she gave a smile of a sort, turned down at the corners, not very
wonderful to look at, really, but with something awkward or shy about it that I
could not object to. She sent me one or two of her short glances but said
nothing.

I said,
‘How’s Steve?’

‘Ah,’
she said again, but went on straight away, ‘He’s all right, he’s fine, he’s
just got some problems which we’re beginning to get a sense of, we need to know
more about him, his early history, all that, I hope you’ll be able to help us
in those areas.’ Where had I heard that sing-song before? ‘Which means I’m
going to have to ask you to give me some of your time.’ Time — toime — West of
England it was, the very thing for Long John Silver, of course, but
extraordinarily ageing for any young or youngish woman, almost as bad as a
southern Irish brogue. ‘I thought the atmosphere here would be more relaxed
than in hospital.’

‘Did
you really? Far from ideal, I should have thought.’

As I
spoke a phone rang from what sounded inches away, closely followed by another,
and a small young man and a bigger older man went by some yards apart with
pieces of paper in their hands, shouting back and forth. Further off a voice
yelled, calling, swearing, yawning.

Dr Collings
seemed to take my point. ‘Or would there be somewhere you’d feel more relaxed?’

‘There
would, quite a few places.’ Places like one of the little rooms at the top of
the Bar and Press Club would be private all right but for that very reason not
relaxing, not for me, not with this female. ‘Er, but I doubt if you’d think
they were suitable.’

She
frowned. ‘Oh? What sort of places are they?’ It was obviously nothing to do
with the frown itself, but I suddenly realized that her breasts were a size or
two bigger than the rest of her. Usually, in fact I dare say every time up to
now, seeing a thing like that had me paying the woman concerned much more
attention automatically, which in this case meant straight away and without
thinking. But the breasts of Dr Collings had no such effect, merely adding up
to one more out-of-place piece of her. Still, they were breasts.

‘What?’
I answered.

‘Where
are you thinking of?’

‘I
thought we might go to a pub,’ I found I had said. ‘If that’s all right.’

‘Sure,
why wouldn’t it be?’

‘They’re
usually pretty quiet for a while yet.’

‘Fine,
fine.’

‘There’s
quite a nice one, well, anyway, just the other side of Fleet Street called the
Crown and Sceptre. Not a hundred yards away. Almost opposite.’

‘All
right. Let’s go.’

‘Well… I was wondering if you’d mind going on and I’ll join you in a few minutes. There’s
just a few things I’d like to get squared away here first, if it’s all tight
with you.’

‘Can’t
they wait?’

‘Well
yes, in a sense of course they can, but, er, unless you’ve got a particular
urgent bit for me I’d very much like to, er … After all, you did —’

‘Mr
Duke,’ she said in her controlled way, ‘which is more important to you, your
son or these matters you seem to be so interested in? Whatever they are.’

One day
quite soon a woman was going to say something very much like that to me,
something hardly at all more noteworthy than that, and I would collapse and die
without recovering consciousness. I put out a hand, not too fast, and gripped
the edge of the desk. ‘My son, of course,’ I said, ‘when it comes to it. If it
has come to it you’d better tell me now, hadn’t you?’

I
thought that was quite good, but before it was half over I lost her again. She
walked out of the office at average speed without looking at me. I could think
of nothing to do but assume I would find her in the designated pub in due
course. Morgan reappeared so immediately that he must have been hanging about
in sight of the doorway.

After a
quick glance over his shoulder he said, ‘Who was that?’

It was
undoubtedly a fair question, but for some reason I found it an impossible one
to answer in any satisfactory way. ‘She’s … a friend of my son’s.’

He
waited till he was sure there was no mote to come before saying ‘Oh yes’ in a
voice that dripped with disbelief and suspicion. The Welsh accent came in handy
for that. There did seem to be rather a lot of accents around that morning, but
then I hardly ever came across anybody without one, apart from me, of course.

‘Yes,’
I said, and gave him a dozen or more boring things
to do and make other people do. When I had finished I rang the Thurifer agency
again and got the fellow I was after. His story was that not he but someone at Thurifer
had gone off his head and I was to stop worrying. So I stopped worrying and
rang Cliff Wainwright, who answered at once and in person and sounding quite
angry. He calmed down somewhat when he discovered who it was, but went back to
being fed up when I asked him about Trish Collings.

‘A bit
off, you know, this, Stanley, quite frankly. Surely you realize it’s most
improper for me to go sounding off about all and bloody sundry.
And
I
don’t possess a card-index system on the whole of the medical profession and
areas adjacent as you appear to think. However, by some freak of chance it does
so happen I’ve heard of the bag. Well above average was what was said. Thoroughly
in touch, very good with the patients. That can be dodgy, of course. Well, what
patients like isn’t necessarily good for them. They’re keen on not being cut
open. For instance. Anyway, there she is.’

‘Do you have any other
children?’ asked Collings.

‘No,’ I
said. ‘Surely Steve must have told you that, if you’ve talked to him at all, as
you say you have.’

‘Not
even by your second wife?’

‘No,
not even by her. Why?’

‘Why
not?’

‘Eh?
Oh, er … Nowell said she couldn’t face going through all that again.’

‘That’s
not what she said to me. Yes, I spent nearly an hour with her before coming along
to see you. She was very helpful.’

‘Really?
In my experience nothing’s what Nowell says to anybody, whether it’s you or me
or the postman. I mean whatever she said’s got nothing to do with what
happened. Ever.’

‘How
long is it since she left you?’

‘Eight
years. Nearly nine. I’m not bitter, it’s just I know her. At least I am,
bitter, to some extent, I can’t ever see myself not being, but it’s much more I
know her, that I say things like that about her. It’s true anyway. She can’t… You’ll see what I mean when you’ve seen a bit more of her. Well, you might,
I suppose.’