White Death (9 page)

‘And you’ve come here to tell me to shut up and stop rocking the boat?’

‘No, I’ve come here to establish the truth.’

Linda looked at Steven as if she wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. ‘And how will you do that?’ she asked.

‘What I’m doing right now, talking to people, asking questions.’

‘Ask away.’

‘I need to know why you think your husband was murdered and why you think it had something to do with a thirteen-year-old girl patient.’

‘If you’d known Scott, you wouldn’t even consider for a moment that he took his own life,’ said Linda with a rueful smile. ‘It’s ridiculous. He would have been the last person on earth to ever contemplate suicide. He was the most positive person I’ve ever known.’

Steven’s look suggested that this wasn’t enough.

‘We were happy,’ insisted Linda. ‘We had everything going for us. Scott had a job he loved, we have two beautiful children, we live in a lovely city. We loved each other dearly … what more do you need?’

When she saw that Steven was still unconvinced, she added, ‘Apart from anything else, Scott was a committed Christian; he spent three years doing voluntary work in Africa before becoming a GP. You really have to be an optimist to do something like that. Talk about lighting a candle being better than cursing the darkness … Suicide was against everything he stood for.’

‘Lives can change in an instant,’ said Steven, although not unkindly. ‘There’s been a suggestion that he might have made a mistake over a young patient which led to her injuring herself. You don’t think this could have led to feelings of guilt?’

Linda shook her head. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘I know all about what happened to Trish Lyons. Scott would have been the first to admit to making any kind of mistake if he had made one but he didn’t. He didn’t believe for a moment that the girl’s injuries had been self-inflicted. He was sure it had been an accident and that her mother had come up with the self-harming claim to get her own back on the medical profession who she felt had been less than understanding about her daughter’s problems. I’m sure the girl herself will confirm this when she recovers.’

‘If she recovers,’ said Steven. ‘She’s very ill.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Steven asked the obvious question. ‘So, if there was no conceivable reason for your husband to commit suicide, Mrs Haldane … what possible reason was there for anyone to murder him?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Linda through gritted teeth. ‘I only know that Scott was found with his wrists cut and he didn’t do it – someone else did.’

For a moment Steven saw despair appear in Linda Haldane’s eyes along with the grief that was already in residence. ‘Look …’ she began, ‘I know how ridiculous this must sound to you and people can be forgiven for thinking I’m just a silly woman who can’t cope with her husband’s suicide … but I am absolutely certain Scott didn’t take his own life.’

Steven could see that this was beyond question. ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid I need more than your certainty,’ he said. ‘I need a motive for his murder. I need to know why you told the police you thought his death was connected in some way to Trish Lyons.’ He knew it sounded cold but it was also true.

‘Although Scott was convinced that Patricia Lyons’ scalding had been an accident, he had some theory about her condition that he couldn’t pursue because of obstacles he claimed were being put in his way. He got very angry and upset about it. Scott hardly ever used bad language but I heard him on one occasion calling it “a bloody conspiracy”.’

Steven said, ‘I understand the girl was one of a group of children being monitored centrally by Public Health people so he might have had difficulty in accessing her medical records?’

‘It wasn’t just that,’ said Linda, ‘although he was annoyed about that too. He kept making phone-calls to people who either wouldn’t speak to him or wouldn’t give him the information he was looking for.’

‘What sort of information?’

‘Scott wouldn’t tell me. He said it was something he would have to be absolutely sure about before he could say anything to anyone.’

‘But if it was upsetting him so much, you must have asked him about it on more than one occasion?’

‘Of course, but he refused point blank to tell me.’

‘Not even you, his wife?’

‘Not even me,’ agreed Linda with a sad smile, taking the point Steven was making.

‘Have you no idea at all who he was trying to phone?’

‘I assumed it was the people who were holding the girl’s medical records – but that’s an assumption on my part.’

‘Actually, it’s quite hard to see why he would need the girl’s medical records,’ said Steven. ‘I mean, you’d think her medical history wouldn’t have had much bearing on the case of a scalding accident.’

Linda shrugged but said, ‘You might not think so but I heard him tell whoever it was he was talking to that he needed more information and telling them to stop being so obstructive.’

‘And you’re absolutely sure your husband never let anything slip about what he was thinking?’

‘I think I would have remembered if he had,’ said Linda. ‘Although there was one occasion when he came off the phone and sat down looking shocked. When I asked him what was wrong he said, “They actually told me to back off if I knew what was good for me.”’

‘But you don’t know who “they” were?’

‘Sorry.’

SIX

Steven headed back into town. He decided he would have to access Trish Lyons’ medical records for himself in order to see if he could find out what Scott Haldane had been so upset about. The surgery was on the way so he would stop off and ask if the records were there although he suspected they might not be, in view of what had subsequently happened to Trish Lyons.

‘I’m sorry,’ said James Gault after checking with the practice manager. ‘They were returned to us but had to be sent off again to the sick children’s hospital to have the scalding incident entered … I should think by now the hospital will probably have sent the notes on to the central monitor. Some day they’ll come back to us …’

‘I get the picture,’ said Steven. ‘Perhaps you could let me have the address of the monitoring body?’

‘Of course; I’ll have to ask Cathy.’

To Steven’s surprise, Gault returned not only with the information he’d asked for but with a woman following along in his wake. She was introduced as Cathy Renton, the practice manager. ‘It’s not quite as simple as I thought,’ confessed Gault.

‘Health matters are devolved in Scotland,’ said Cathy. ‘But monitoring in this instance is part of a UK initiative. The bottom line is that we have to channel the records through the Scottish Executive who then forward them to the UK body and vice versa when they’re returned.’

‘Why?’ said Steven.

‘I suppose the Executive needs to know what’s going on,’ said Cathy with a half apologetic smile. She handed Steven the address and phone number of the Scottish Executive body dealing with the forwarding of medical records.

‘Woodburn House,’ Steven read out.

‘It’s not far from here,’ said Cathy. ‘It’s in Canaan Lane, just off Morningside Road.’

It took twelve minutes from the time Steven showed his ID to the girl on the desk until he was shown into the office of someone who ‘might be able to help’, the intervening time having been taken up with internal phone-calls and subsequent transfers within the building. Miss Collinwood, when he was shown into her office, wasn’t too sure either if it was ‘within her area’.

‘What is it you need exactly?’ she asked.

‘I’d like to see the medical records for a patient named Patricia Lyons, a thirteen-year-old girl registered with Dr Scott Haldane at the Links Practice in Bruntsfield.’

‘Then why come here?’

‘Because the Links Practice told me her records were sent here.’

‘I’m sorry. Why?’

‘Apparently she was a
green sticker
patient – one of a number of children being monitored after having been exposed to tuberculosis at a school camp in the Lake District.’

‘The Lake District? That’s in England. I don’t think we would be monitoring anything as far south …’

‘No,’ interrupted Steven, starting to run out of patience. ‘You’re not doing the monitoring but apparently medical records from Scottish children on the list have to come to you first before being submitted to the English body.’

‘Why?’

‘What an awfully good question,’ said Steven. ‘But they do. Surely somebody here must know where the girl’s records are?’

‘Give me a moment.’ Miss Collinwood picked up the phone.

Steven got up to examine the watercolours on the walls of the office, hoping to find a calming influence in them while the phone-calls mounted up. Lucky number five, he thought when he heard Miss Collinwood say, ‘You do, Jan? That’s great.’

‘Mrs Thomson’s been dealing with green stickers.’

‘Good show,’ said Steven with a smile. ‘Where do I find her?’

He was led along the corridor to another almost identical office where Jan Thomson, a short pixie-like woman with bobbed hair and a pointed nose, shook his hand and invited him in. ‘How can I help?’

Steven temporarily suppressed his belief that the person asking this question could invariably never be of help and told her what he was looking for.

‘I see.’ The woman repositioned her computer screen and typed in some details. ‘Out of luck, I’m afraid. They’ve gone south.’

‘Don’t you keep copies?’

‘No, we just forward them and return them to the relevant surgeries when they come back.’

‘Like a conduit,’ said Steven flatly.

‘Well, we like to know what’s going on.’

‘So what is going on?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘If you like to know what’s going on, presumably you have some record of what’s going on.’

‘No, I told you, we just forward the records and then return them.’

‘Without noting anything down?’

‘Look, Dr Dunbar, I don’t make the rules.’

‘Of course not, forgive me,’ said Steven, back-tracking in a damage limitation exercise. There was nothing to be gained from conflict with authority. ‘We’re both cogs in the great government machine. Perhaps you can give me the address of the UK body that deals with green sticker patients?’

A few taps on the keyboard and Jan Thomson wrote details on to a Post-it note.

‘And maybe some information about the school camp that was the cause of all this?’

More taps and another note.

Steven thanked the woman and left thinking that he had exactly the same feeling inside him the last time he’d been in a government office. He reflected that he was experiencing the same exasperation that had upset Scott Haldane so much. He found a coffee shop in Morningside Road and ordered a double espresso while he brought out the two notes from his pocket. The monitoring body was called ‘Lakeland TBMG’ – which he guessed stood for TB monitoring group – and was located at an address in Whitehall, London. The school camp was called ‘Pinetops’ and was sited on the shores of Lake Windermere, not far from Bowness-on-Windermere and not that far from where he himself had been brought up. It conjured up images of
Swallows and Amazons
and children having a good time in glorious scenery.

The TB monitoring group, however, reminded him of stories he’d read in the medical journals recently about tuberculosis making a comeback in the UK after having almost been wiped out in the Sixties. For some years now, it had been thought no longer necessary to test children for the illness or offer them protection against it. This had resulted in a population which was vulnerable to the disease now being brought in by immigrants – a touchy subject in both medical and social terms. On top of this, drug-resistant strains were not uncommon and were proving notoriously difficult to treat.

As he sipped his coffee, Steven wondered if there was any point in his staying longer in Edinburgh. He supposed he could have a word with Trish Lyons’ mother but wasn’t convinced that that would serve any real purpose apart from upsetting the woman. On the other hand if Trish had said anything about her ‘accident’ since her admission to hospital it might help a great deal and this was something he should be able to find out discreetly from the hospital itself.

If Trish had scalded herself deliberately when psychiatric help at an earlier stage might have prevented it, then suicide was still a possibility for Scott Haldane despite all that his wife had said. If, however, the girl could confirm that it had been an accident, the puzzle over Haldane’s death would remain and the possibility of murder, however unlikely, could not be dismissed entirely although there were no forensics to support this and no apparent motive either, only the belief of a grieving widow.

Steven arrived at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children shortly after 3 p.m. and spoke to the registrar involved in treating Trish Lyons, Dr John Fielding.

‘She’s still a very ill young lady,’ said Fielding.

‘The scalding was that bad?’

Fielding appeared to be uncomfortable with the question. He scratched his head in a nervous gesture and said, ‘The scalding was bad but … it’s the healing process that really concerns us …’

‘In what way?’

Another nervous gesture. ‘Well … it’s not really happening.’ The words hung in the air like the calm before a storm. ‘It’s as if there’s some psychological reason for her not improving.’

‘I understand she was suffering from vitiligo,’ said Steven.

Fielding nodded. ‘That’s what’s making us think there’s a psychological factor involved. Apart from the burns, the vitiligo seems to be spreading. She’s developed patches on her legs and feet.’

‘Poor girl, she’s having a nightmare time of it.’

‘Actually … she’s disturbingly calm and detached about it. Worryingly so.’

Steven remembered Trish’s mother apparently having said something similar about her daughter’s state when she found her on the kitchen floor. ‘A long time for shock to persist,’ he said.

‘Quite,’ said Fielding.

‘Has she said anything at all yet?’

‘Not much.’

Steven put his cards on the table and admitted that his real interest was in establishing whether the scalding had been accidental or not.