The Company She Kept (7 page)

She rang Madeleine Freeman's home as soon as she could after their return from Pennybridge, but all she got was the answering service, advising her to try the surgery. There, she received a frosty reception from the dragon who answered, to the effect that Doctor couldn't
possibly
see anyone that morning, it wasn't her scheduled surgery. In the end, a reluctant concession was achieved, as it finally got through that this was urgent police business: they could come in about nine-thirty and catch Doctor between house-visits. That was when she usually popped in to the surgery to see if any more calls had come in for her and to pick up her post.

The tiny patch of flowerbed through which a few sparrow-bitten crocuses had mistakenly pushed hopeful heads didn't make the brick-built surgery look any less like a British Telecom sub-station. A small, dumpy erection, it squatted on the edge of the Somerville estate in the middle of an area of waste ground which was advertised as being ripe for development. According to the board outside, the all-woman partnership was shared with Dr Aisha Lall and Dr Mary Smith; inside, the patients jammed into the small waiting-room were mostly harassed-looking women and noisy, under-school-age children with runny noses and hacking coughs.

‘Another five minutes and you'd have missed her! Doctor's just about to set off again, but she'll see you for a few minutes,' the dragon announced, brisk and condescending, intimating that this was an unheard-of favour. Middle-aged, grey and officious, she held the telephone between her chin and her shoulder while walking the fingers of one hand through patient-record envelopes in the filing cabinet, and at the same time dealing with a patient on the end of the line. ‘Right, Mrs Painter, I've given you eleven, OK? Don't be late or you'll miss your appointment.' Replacing the receiver smartly, she tapped figures into a small computer by her side, and only then did she jerk her head towards a door in the corner marked:
PLEASE KNOCK AND ENTER
.

‘In there,' she ordered the two detectives. ‘Don't forget to knock before you go in.'

‘No, ma'am,' Mayo said.

Dr Freeman already had her coat on and was finishing a mug of coffee while writing something on a prescription pad. Mayo was beginning to feel a serious lack of initiative in himself at having only one object in view. She motioned them to sit down but remained standing while she asked what she could do for them.

Abigail told her who they were and that they were investigating the suspicious death of a woman. ‘We're hoping you may be able to help in identifying her.'

‘Oh dear! Yes, of course I'll help if you think I can – one of my patients, was she?' The doctor looked grave, but not unduly disturbed. Death, after all, came within the daily scope of her job. Pushing her papers away, she regarded them inquiringly, giving her mind immediately to what was being said, a tall, collected sort of woman with steady eyes behind large spectacles, a firm, smiling mouth, a well-cut hairstyle, large calm doctor's hands with short, unvarnished nails. Her skin was glowing and entirely without make-up. She looked as wholesome as new bread and eminently sensible.

‘We think her name might be Angie Robinson.'

Death took on a different aspect when it was someone you knew. However familiar it was to her, professionally speaking, however accustomed she was to helping patients cope, it didn't help the doctor now. She sat down abruptly but after an interval of absolute stillness, and though her face had drained of colour, she braced herself, sat upright and asked without a tremor, ‘What makes you think it's her?'

‘One of my men thought he recognized her,' Mayo said. ‘She has a very distinctive birthmark ...'

It was evidently the answer she'd feared. ‘Yes, I see. I see.'

‘We shall need a formal identification of course. Her next of kin ...?'

‘She has none.' The doctor took a deep breath. ‘I'm prepared to identify her.'

‘It won't be pleasant, I'm afraid.' He told her how Angie Robinson – if it was her – had died, and where.

‘Better me than anyone else. It won't be the first time I've seen a dead body. And I was closer to her than anyone.'

‘Perhaps we should see a photograph first, if you have one.' He was reluctant to subject her to an ordeal which might, despite the near certainty, be unnecessary. But it was immediately obvious, when she produced a snapshot from her handbag, that the woman pictured there, and the one now lying on the mortuary slab, were one and the same person. Even though the profile turned to the camera had been her unmarked side.

Yes, that was Angie Robinson, the doctor agreed ten minutes later, looking down with a frozen expression at her friend, decently covered apart from the face, laid out in the County Hospital mortuary chapel. She was silent for a long time, but before turning away she stretched out a hand towards the body and gently, almost caressingly, pulled forward the hair so that it more or less covered the livid mark on the face. ‘Poor love, she minded so terribly anyone seeing it.'

When they were again outside Mayo reminded her that it would be necessary to talk. ‘Is there somewhere here in the hospital where we can have a few minutes?'

The doctors' common room was her first suggestion, but on second thoughts it would be better, she amended swiftly, if they went across to where she lived in Kilbracken Road, only a few streets away. It was the only way to be certain there'd be no interruptions. Mayo glanced at his watch, saw there was time since the PM wasn't scheduled to take place for another hour, and agreed. Their car followed her Volvo along the circuitous ring road to a quiet, tree-lined road situated between the hospital and the red brick buildings of Lavenstock College. Parking outside a sizeable terrace house with a house agent's sign planted in the garden, she ran quickly up the steps and unlocked the door.

The room she took them into was spacious and high-ceilinged with wide, sashed windows, a fireplace with a mahogany surround and mirrored overmantel, and a general air of solid, unimaginative comfort, apparently furnished in the early years of the century and largely untouched since. The heavy, drab-coloured curtains and Persian-patterned carpet muffled the sounds from outside as she bent to switch on an electric fire in the grate. ‘Tell me about it, please. I'd like to know the details, though it's going to take time to absorb. Hartopp Moor! Why on earth should she be out there – and why,
why
should anyone want to kill Angie anyway?'

It was the question they all asked, understandably, manifesting the normal person's bewilderment when faced with the incomprehension of violent death. ‘
Why her, or him?
' And usually, ‘
What have they ever done to deserve this?
' though quite often the answer to that one was patently obvious. Mayo never attempted to answer the unanswerable, and in this case she didn't seem to expect it. He said, ‘I have to ask you if she'd quarrelled with anyone lately, or if there was someone likely to have had a grudge against her?'

‘Nobody. I would have known if there had been.'

‘When was the last time you saw her?'

‘On Sunday. She had lunch with me.'

‘How was she? Did she seem any different from usual?'

‘No, just the same Angie I've always known.'

He said, ‘Did she have any particular man friend?'

The doctor blinked, then shook her head decisively. Angie had known very few men. To be truthful, she hadn't had a very high opinion of the opposite sex. ‘She had a rotten childhood, her father was a man with an evil temper, a beast of a man who used to beat both her and her mother, and eventually left them when Angie was thirteen.' She gave a twisted smile. ‘As you might imagine, it made her very choosy who she went out with. And also, she was very conscious of her face ... though she needn't have been. It wasn't so very bad, and when you knew her you forgot about the mark.'

All at once, tears sprang to her eyes, seeming to startle her as much as her audience. ‘Excuse me,' she mumbled, taking off her spectacles and fumbling for her handkerchief to rub them angrily away, as if ashamed of them. ‘Please excuse me.'

Without asking, Abigail crossed to a drinks tray set out on a side table, poured and brought back a long glass of mineral water. ‘Thank you.' The doctor drank thirstily. ‘You must forgive me, it's been such a shock.' Clutching the half-full glass as if it were a comfort to hold on to something stable, she said, ‘We'd known each other since we were at school together and I've always felt myself responsible for her – she was never really very good at looking after herself.'

A nice woman but very earnest, the doctor, Mayo summed her up, the sort of woman who felt it incumbent upon her to be responsible for others.

‘As a matter of fact,' she went on, ‘she lived here with me until recently – until she moved out and got another place. Perhaps if she hadn't ...'

‘I noticed your house is up for sale. Is that why she did that?'

‘Did what?'

‘Moved out.'

‘Oh. Oh yes. I'm getting married next month, and moving out as soon as possible.'

‘Congratulations. Who's the lucky man?'

‘His name's Bouvier, Edward Bouvier, he's a vascular surgeon. A little late in the day for both of us, but ...' She rubbed at the frown line between her brows, as if she had a headache, but a little of her lost colour returned to her face.

Mayo was mildly surprised. Madeleine Freeman was undoubtedly an attractive woman, in her late thirties, he guessed, not an unusually late age for marriage, considering the times. Women – he was well aware of this, to his cost – now wanted to make sure of their careers before committing themselves to marriage and family life. But she had immediately struck him as a woman who would value her independence too much for that. That her caring would be at a distance; a woman essentially central to herself.

‘We've bought a new house at Tannersley, a modern house. New furniture, much more to my taste than all this,' she said, her quick glance sweeping round the room, accompanied by a slight shiver, as if dismissive of old ghosts and echoes. ‘All this will go.'

‘Quite a change in your life, then,' Mayo remarked. ‘And in Miss Robinson's, too, I imagine?'

Quickly, she said, ‘Yes, but she was very happy for me. In any case, we never expected to live together permanently. We always knew it was possible that one of us might want to move out for some reason, or get married ...' She hesitated. ‘She had the chance of a very nice flat in Bulstrode Street a few weeks ago and decided to move in immediately. She didn't want to be left here on her own for any length of time.'

Mayo knew Bulstrode Street but kept his expression neutral. After this? Bulstrode Street? Right in the middle of the sad no man's land of bedsits and one-person flats just beyond the town centre. An enclave for single people, living alone, many of them women – and as such, an area with an ongoing prowler problem. Abigail caught his eye. Maybe, their exchange of glances said, they'd have the answer to her death sooner than they imagined.

Maybe, thought Mayo, adding to himself that the dead woman was unlikely to have been as happy at the change in her fortunes as the good doctor wanted to think. Her naïve assumption of her friend's acceptance of the big change in her life surely involved a certain amount of self-deception, or even guilt, that she herself was coming off decidedly better in the switch-round than Angie. He reminded himself of the photo of the murdered woman, now in his pocket. Petite, with a lot of blonde hair, an above-the-knees skirt, wearing the high heels that many short women considered indispensable. But that first assumption, at the first sight of her body with its disarranged clothes, that she'd been a tart, that was all wrong – he'd been right to have doubts about that. One look at the closed, prim little face told you otherwise. She was simply the sort of woman, he suspected, who had got herself locked into a style of dressing that had once suited her, with a hairstyle that was many years too young for her ageing face and a skirt length, despite its current fashion, several inches too short for her. A woman, he strongly suspected, afraid of growing old.

‘I shouldn't have let her go,' Dr Freeman said abruptly. ‘I should have looked after her better. But it was only temporary, that flat of hers, until she got herself fixed up with somewhere better. Though as a matter of fact, I'm inclined to think she'd probably already found it. At lunch on Sunday she was very excited. She'd only hint at what it was but I guessed. She was like that, you know – she used to get a childish enjoyment out of keeping a secret, she liked to keep you guessing.' The ghost of a smile briefly touched the corners of her lips. ‘She spoke about a very important meeting with some man and she laughed and said it was going to change her future, and in the context of what we'd been speaking about, I took it to mean she was going to view some new accommodation.' Her long capable fingers convulsively clutched the glass that had held the mineral water. ‘Oh God, perhaps I was wrong –'

‘No, that may be very helpful. We'll make inquiries with all the house agents in the town, unless ...This man – I don't suppose she told you his name, where he lived, what he did for a living?'

‘Nothing at all. Though I must confess I wasn't paying all that much attention. I had other things on my mind, the new house for one thing ...'

He finally stood up, after establishing that the doctor had had a surgery the previous day until seven. She'd gone straight home when it finished and at eight-fifteen her fiancé, Edward Bouvier, had called to take her to dine out. He wasn't entirely satisfied with the interview. Abigail

had taken several pages of notes – but even so, what they had about the dead woman didn't amount to much more than an eyeful of cold tea. She had worked at the Women's Hospital as a clerk on the reception desk. Angela Margaret Robinson, aged 38, unmarried, unattached. No special friends other than Dr Freeman, no interests except helping tirelessly in the doctor's campaign to keep the Women's Hospital open. It didn't sound much of a life, nor give any indication of the sort of woman she had been, popular or disliked, happy or dissatisfied. She must have had her hopes and aspirations, too, but this bald outline revealed nothing except that she had seemingly been content to live in the shadow of her friend. There was nothing on this showing that could have led to someone wanting to murder her.