The Operator (Bruce and Bennett Crime Thriller 2) (29 page)

‘Absolutely. And change their lifestyles. Live as
God intended. Don’t abuse their bodies. Then any small imbalances in the vital
force can be corrected by homeopathic remedies.’

‘What if someone’s in an accident, caused by
someone who hasn’t adjusted their lifestyle choices? Broken bones, damaged
joints. Surely they need a hospital?’

‘In a properly regulated society, surgeons would
be regarded as simply mechanics. They would put the body back into anatomical
order and then homeopathic remedies would help the body heal itself.’

As usual, her devil’s advocate tendencies were
coming out. When talking to Jamie, she had made many of the same points as
Craig Anderson, but now hearing them in a more extreme form, she felt like
arguing for the other side.

‘What about pain, Mr Anderson? Surely some
conditions are helped by pain relief. Surely you agree that a parent cannot see
their child suffer pain without wanting to relieve it? That doctors can
sometimes...’

‘Doctors! I’d like to see them forced to suffer
the treatment they dish out!’

He was on his feet, bulky and threatening. His
face was white. She forced herself to stay calm. This man needed help of some
kind. Or maybe she did. Somehow she’d found the button to press. Not so sure
now she wanted to know any more, just get out of there with her own temple of a
body intact.

‘Well, thank you for your frank expression of
views,’ she was trying to sound breezy while getting up and scrabbling her
recorder back into her bag. ‘I’ll put a piece in the paper, but I’ll have to be
careful about some of the more extreme opinions...’

‘Of course,’ he muttered but dully, without the
usual scorn.

She still wanted out, but his hostility seemed to
have gone back into hiding. It wasn’t directed at her, amateur therapist as she
was in his eyes, but at doctors. She risked another question, really wanting to
know.

‘So do you treat yourself? Do you find you can
diagnose any imbalances in your own physical or mental health? Most of us find
that difficult, and if you are so erm, purist, it must be hard to find another
practitioner with similar views.’

‘I haven’t needed any help so far, Ms Bruce. I eat
only healthy, unpolluted unprocessed organic food, exercise hard, don’t drink
or smoke, and therefore I’m in perfect balance.’

Physically, possibly. Mentally, she wasn’t so
sure. He followed her back towards the front of the house, it was like
tunnelling to freedom, the light from the street through the front door panes
increasing like a view of heaven. Erica was trying not to scurry, run for the
light, intensely aware of his bulk behind her, though he moved quietly. Captain
Jack Aubrey could always feel the ‘loom of the land’ when out at sea. Well
Craig Anderson was looming like a cliff. He could out-loom Will Bennett any
day. She reached for the door like an alcoholic for a gin bottle.

At last she stood on the garden path, in daylight
and in public. This was her last chance to ask about the killings. ‘By the way,
what do you think about the two murders of surgeons? Do you think the killer,
the Operator as they call him now, might start on alternative therapists?’

‘I’m not wasting any sympathy on those two. It’s
usually doctors that do the killing. Look at all the doctors who’ve killed in
history. All those ‘doctors’ who killed thousands of women in childbirth by
spreading their filthy germs in the lying-in hospitals. Doctors in Nazi death
camps. How did Shipman get away with it for so long? Playing on peoples’
misplaced trust. It’s probably another doctor who’s the killer. They’re all
jealous of each other you know.’

‘Know a lot of doctors, do you?’

‘Know thine enemy.’

‘I thought you were supposed to love the enemy.’
She remembered the framed biblical texts on Anderson’s walls.

‘He that is not with us, is against us,’ he
replied.

And closed the door.

She jogged back to the metro station. The wind was
cold on her cheeks, seemed even colder as she stood waiting, the approaching
train preceded by gusts of suddenly animated junk food wrappers.

Had she just been alone with a murderer? The way
he had behaved showed him to be anything but in perfect balance, whatever his
claims. His feelings about doctors could only be described as murderous. But
would he ever put those feelings into action? Should she tell the police about
him? She had no actual evidence. Will had suggested himself that an alternative
therapist could be the killer, but only, she was sure, to scare her off getting
involved with the case, and hence with his life. She wondered if the police had
in fact looked at that avenue of enquiry.

But would Anderson have sounded off so freely if
he was guilty? Surely he would have dissembled, smiled and smiled and been a
villain, to avoid drawing attention to himself. Maybe not, if he was really
unbalanced to the point of madness, really believed he was right, a lone
avenger doing the world a favour by ridding it of doctors.... a sort of folie à
un.

Kingston had had quite a high media profile,
clearly putting his own glory and status before the patients’ wellbeing,
certainly as Anderson might have seen it. But why would Anderson target
Chambers? Perhaps he disapproved of vasectomies? Surgical birth control as some
sort of heresy, a denial of the god-given life force?

As the Metro neared her
usual home stop, she felt the familiar urge to be close to the sea. Though
standing on the platform with its chilly desolation had made her fleetingly
wonder why everyone didn’t desert the north east coast and move en masse to the
Côte d’Azur, she never felt like leaving the north sea and didn’t care how
bleak or icy the wind while she was in sight of it. They say you can never step
in the same river twice. You can never see the same wave twice either. The
rising wind would be driving the waves hard against the piers at the mouth of
the river Tyne with all its spectacular drama, and she felt a need to be there
amid all that raw energy where thought and belief were alien and redundant.

So she stayed on the Metro for a couple more stops
and jogged down the short street to the river mouth. The two piers with their small
lighthouses on the ends curved out their welcoming arms to make a relatively
safe harbour after centuries of lives lost mere yards from dry land, as ships
foundered on the Black Middens rocks.

She jogged slowly, not having proper trainers on,
to the end of the north pier. She liked it best when the water was stormy. It
was a brighter day than when she’d met Will here but the sea had built up to a
fine display of power. To her left, the waves flung themselves against the pier
wall with a loud ‘Ger-DUNSH!’ sending plumes of glittering white spray
sprinkled with rainbows shooting up like geysers. The wind tried to blow her
sideways as she ran.

A great splat of water fell right next to her as a
particularly mighty wave managed to storm the battlements of the pier.
Sometimes, quite often in winter, whole waves washed right over the pier, and
even leapt the lighthouse on the end. People would gather to watch the
spectacle from the land end of the pier on a viewing platform after the
harbourmaster had emerged from his little hut and walked to the end and back,
shepherding all the walkers and anglers off the pier before locking the big
wrought iron gates to keep them off. It wasn’t far from those conditions now.

She leaned on the green-weed-coated salty wall,
watching the waves, thinking as her hair whipped her face. Weren’t journalists
supposed to protect their sources? But she was not a journalist, Ian Dunne had
made that very clear when he rejected her article. And what if she told the
police that Craig Anderson might have a motive, albeit an irrational one, and
he found out? Even if he was innocent of the murders, any hint of persecution
might push him over the edge, and she didn’t fancy facing his rage. Not with
those muscles. Could she trust Will not to dob her in? Throw her to the batshit
crazy wolf in wolf’s clothing?

But then, Anderson had given her an interview
freely. He’d let her leave with her recording intact. All she had to do was
write up the interview, add some researched relevant info and it would be
published on the health page. No chance Ian Dunne would be so defensive about a
mere nutcase homeopath as he’d been about Kingston. Then it would be in the
public domain, and it was up to the police to do something about it if they wanted
to. There must be loads of others who hated doctors, with or without reason. A
bungled vasectomy leading to a disastrous pregnancy; or a regret at having it
done being turned against the doctor who did it; these could be motives for
Paul Chambers’ murder if it was a copycat killing.

She headed back along the pier. More and more
waves were managing to throw their crests over the wall, and several times she
was soaked with icy spray. She knew from soggy experience that what looked like
a graceful lacy arc of droplets felt like a ton of bricks if you were right
under it when it landed. Luckily she avoided a direct hit which could have
knocked her down. Home, she changed into dry clothes, made a much needed mug of
Earl Grey, and sat down then and there to write up the interview. Fearless
Erica Bruce, exposing all that was weird and wacky in the world of health.
Writing it was a breeze compared with getting a brush through her salt-sticky
windblown hair.

Now it was a question of waiting until it was
published in a few days time, together with another article about what to do if
your child bumped its head and a few letters with replies.

Re-reading her Kingston article now, she felt a
shudder at the thought of the swung stone crashing against the back of the head,
the bone caving, shards of skull piercing the brain. She wondered how it felt.
Did you hear it, that huge sound of your death? Did you feel the shock, or just
enter a state of unconsciousness or semi-consciousness? How much time was there
to realise what was happening before blackness descended? Had Kingston and
Chambers realised they were doomed from the moment the weight made contact with
their skulls? Or was puzzlement their last conscious feeling? She ran a hand
over her horse’s skull. Bone seemed so solid, rounded, a safe box for the
brain, yet a fall backwards could breach it.

Covering herself and of course Dunne and the
paper, she added a rider to the article on Craig Anderson. ‘Erica Bruce advises
that the opinions voiced above are the subject’s own, and the
Evening
Guardian
would recommend seeking the advice of your GP as well as that of
an alternative therapist.’

She felt a twinge of shame. Didn’t she have the
courage of her convictions? Didn’t she believe in her own branch of medicine?
She was still reeling under Simon Singh’s attacks on homeopathy, yet had so
much personal experience of how it worked so often and so well. And so much
knowledge of how little scientists knew about quantum theory, and the Big Bang,
and before the Big Bang, and yet felt able to make definitive statements about
the universe with what seemed like no more proof than homeopathy. They even
said that asking the sensible question ‘What was there before the Big Bang?’
couldn’t be answered as it was meaningless. Lots of scientists were religious,
with no scientific proof required.

She reflected how all the really scary people in
history had been as sure as Anderson, and felt better. She knew going to the GP
wouldn’t stop people seeking the help of homeopaths and chiropractors,
hypnotherapists and other more dubious ‘ologists’. Most of the patients they
saw had already been shown the door by GPs and consultants who said it was all
in their minds. Got to keep Jamie in work, she thought fondly even though it
meant she wouldn’t see much of him.

The next evening Erica was
working a late session at Ivy Lodge. She’d been there all day, and was coming
to the end of a solid batch of patients. True to form for this time of year,
colds, coughs, earache, and various related symptoms predominated. This was one
area where homeopathic medicine could really come into its own. All
conventional medicine could offer was paracetamol in assorted disguises, often
mixed with caffeine for a quick lift, some lemon flavouring for comfort,
anything that would temporarily mask the symptoms. ‘It’s something going round,’
as GPs said of most common illnesses. ‘Drink plenty of fluids, rest, and it’ll
go away by itself.’

She’d seen her last patient and was bringing her
computer records up to date when darkness filled her doorway like an extra
wall. It was Craig Anderson.

Stacey had been around, but had vanished into Rina’s
room mumbling about ‘mint neet oot’ preparations involving a nap, then later
hair re-building and root blackening, and front loading with cheap voddie. If
she had her earphones in, Erica was as good as alone in the building.

‘Evening, Ms Bruce.’

He moved forward, light on his feet in spite of
his bulk, and sat down. Something heavy in his jacket pocket clunked against
the chair frame when he did so. Erica put her hand on her mobile in her pocket.

It was her turn to keep her distance behind a
desk.

‘What can I do for you?’ She tried to keep her
voice light. Her turn also to attempt the still, in-control body language. He
was doing it too. They must have looked like a couple of dummies, she thought,
but she wasn’t ready to see the funny side just yet.

She could sense that tension in him again. His
eyes were narrowed as if against the light, as if it hurt.

‘I want to be your patient. Please put my details
on file.’

He said it like an order. Her patient? With such a
low opinion of her as a practitioner?

‘Do you have a health problem at the moment?’