Chameleon

It was another ten minutes before a woman, carrying a bundle of papers under her arm and a key in her mouth, turned round as she emerged and locked the door. Jamieson, feeling bemused but still fairly confident that he had not missed Thelwell among the earlier crowds, approached her and excused himself.

'I was rather hoping to catch Gordon Thelwell this evening,' he said pleasantly. 'Could I have missed him?'

'Oh no,' exclaimed the woman. 'Mr Thelwell wasn't here this evening.'

'Oh,' said Jamieson working at keeping the surprise off his face.

'Are you sure?'

'Mr Thelwell hasn't been coming to practice for some time,' volunteered the woman. 'He's too busy at the hospital these days I understand. He's a surgeon you know. They've been having a bit of trouble with one thing and another.'

'Of course,' replied Jamieson distantly. 'I should have considered that.'

Jamieson sat behind the wheel of his car with another unpleasant discovery to digest. All these choir practises that Thelwell said he had been going to were a fabrication. A lie. What had he really been doing on these evenings? Where was he tonight? Was it relevant to the problem at the hospital?

Jamieson drove round in circles for a while, trying to make sense of it all before deciding finally to drive to the street where Thelwell lived. It was now his intention to confront Thelwell openly with what he had discovered. He parked the car on the other side of the road some fifty metres along from Thelwell's house and settled down to wait.

At eleven thirty, his vigil was rewarded. Thelwell's dark green Volvo estate car turned into the street and Jamieson prepared to get out of his car. He had expected Thelwell to park outside his house on the street or at least to get out to open the gates in front of his drive. On this pretext it had been his plan to intercept him on the pavement. But, in the event, Thelwell swung his car in towards the gates and they opened automatically at the signal from some device on the car. By the time Jamieson reached the house the gates had closed again and Thelwell was putting the car away in the garage.

Light spilled out into the garden from the open front door and Thelwell's wife was framed in the doorway. 'You're late dear,' Jamieson heard her say.

'The practice went on a bit longer than I thought and then I had a quick drink with Roger Denby,' replied Thelwell.

Thelwell was a very plausible liar, thought Jamieson. He had sounded perfectly natural when replying to his wife. He considered whether or not he should confront Thelwell there and then in front of his wife but then decided against it. For the moment it was enough for him to know that Thelwell had been lying to everyone, including his wife. He walked back to his car thoughtfully and drove back to the hospital.

The phone in his room was ringing when Jamieson got in. He hurriedly unlocked the door and rushed over to snatch it from its cradle, feeling certain that the caller would hang up the moment he touched it. It was Sue.

'Where have you been?' she asked. 'I've been trying your number for ages.'

'I had to go out,' said Jamieson weakly.

'Daddy has invited us to have dinner with him on Saturday. I said we'd be delighted.'

'Sue, there's a problem.'

'What do you mean?'

'I don't think I can come home this week-end.'

'But…' Sue's voice trailed off into silence.

'I'm sorry, really I am but the way things are going I just can't get away.'

'I see,' said Sue distantly. 'That's a pity. I had something to tell you.'

'Really? What?'

'It will have to wait for some time when you're not so busy.' The phone went dead.

'Shit,' said Jamieson quietly. It was unlike Sue to be like that. She must be very disappointed.

Jamieson was up at seven. He was washed, shaved and out of his room by seven thirty and had breakfasted. He was in his little room in the Microbiology department by eight. The morning cleaners were emptying waste paper baskets outside in the corridor. They pooled all the waste in a large bin which they wheeled around the department on a small wheeled bogie.

'It's getting so you are afraid to go out at night,' he heard one of them say.

'My Stan won't let me,' declared the other positively. 'Not after last night. It was less than quarter of a mile away from us!'

'Makes you think don't it.'

Jamieson felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. 'Last night? What had happened last night? He opened the door of his room and one of the cleaners clutched her arms across her chest in fright. 'Oh my God!' she exclaimed. 'You gave me such a fright. I thought for a moment you were him!'

'Who?' asked Jamieson.

'The maniac. The ripper,' replied the woman.

'You said something about last night,' said Jamieson.

'The swine killed another woman last night. I was just telling Ruby here. It was only half a mile down the road from where I stay.'

'Another woman?'

'Young lass. She'd just said good night to her boy friend. The bastard must have been waiting for her.'

'What are the police doing? That's what I want to know,' exclaimed the other woman angrily.

'Too right. It isn't safe to cross your door these nights. Them with their free uniforms and rent allowances.'

'And they retire on a big pension at fifty. My brother-in-law's boy Ronnie joined the police and I know for a fact…'

Jamieson withdrew from the conversation and closed his door. He could feel the pulse beating in his temple. He fought with his imagination but it insisted on giving him another nightmare thought to consider. There had been another death in the city and it had occurred on a night when Gordon Thomas Thelwell had said he was at choir practice. But he hadn't been. Jamieson knew that for a fact.

The enormity of what he was considering kept Jamieson paralysed in his seat while he worried about it. Could Thelwell not only be deliberately causing the deaths of women patients at the hospital but could he… could he possibly be the psychopath who was slaughtering women in the city? Could Thelwell be the ripper?

Jamieson started to think in practical terms and that meant obtaining hard evidence. He wondered about a correlation between the other killings and Thelwell's choir practice nights. Perhaps he could find out from St Serf's? He would think about that later. For the moment, his immediate priority was to obtain the surgical listing for the day in gynaecology. He called the theatre sister.

'Mr Morton is operating at ten. Will you be attending?'

Jamieson said that he would and said that on no account was the operation to begin without his being present.

'Very well doctor,' replied the sister, her voice betraying the puzzlement that she felt.

Jamieson called Blaney in the Central Sterile Supply Department and asked about the availability of spare instrument packs for surgery in gynaecology.

'We have about a dozen,' Blaney replied.

'I need three.'

'When?'

'Right now. I'm coming across to collect them.'

When Jamieson returned with the instruments he saw Clive Evans arrive in the car park and waited for him in the doorway to the lab. 'I want you to come with me to theatre this morning. Does that present any problems?'

'No I don't think so,' replied Evans. 'Are you going to tell me why?'

'I want you to remove some instrument packs and screen them for bacterial contamination.'

'If you say so,' said Evans. 'These ones too?' he asked seeing what Jamieson was carrying.