Cholecystectomy: he’d have to look that up.
Bernard Salt’s signature at the end of the page; dashed off in no time at all, pitched between a scrawl and a flourish.
“Who usually fills in the record book?” Patel had asked, polite and always eager to learn. “Yes, after an operation.”
The answer was the circulating nurse and this particular one was still at the hospital, that day, that moment in the recovery ward, a broad-boned woman with skin like raw washing left too long in the wind.
“Oh yes,” she said, Midlands accent, uncertain. “Yes, that was me. You see, my handwriting, I’m afraid it’s not the best.”
“And this operation, a long time ago, I know, but I was wondering … perhaps there is something you remember?”
The look in her eyes told Patel that there was.
“I don’t know,” she said, casting her eyes about her already, concerned that she might be overheard. “We were asked, you see, not to talk about it.”
“Of course,” said Patel reassuringly. “I understand. But this is a police inquiry.”
“Into this?”
“No. Oh, no. Of course not. But we think, well there is a possibility, there might be some connection.”
The nurse sucked in her lower lip, distorting her face.
“If it might help to put a stop to what’s going on, you’d want us to know, wouldn’t you. I mean, you’d want to help put a stop to all this, these attacks?”
“But this was three years ago. More than that even. I can’t see …”
“Trust me,” Patel said. “If it isn’t relevant, nobody need ever know we’ve ever talked about it. I can promise you that.”
She sighed and he could see that she had made up her mind. “The patient … he was on his way out of the theater, being wheeled, you know, here to recovery, and I could see that he was crying, really crying, and I stopped, you know, the trolley and went to touch him, just on the shoulder, to touch him and he screamed. Screamed and screamed and screamed. Ever such a fuss and palaver we had calming him down. And then he told us-well, you don’t know, do you? — but what he said was, right through the operation, he knew everything that was going on. He’d been able to feel the whole thing.”
Once, back in Bradford, Patel’s paternal grandfather had been taken suddenly ill and rushed to hospital. Even as the old man lay there in the middle of a ward of strangers, palpably dying, it had been all but impossible to extract information from the doctors. Don’t worry. No need for anxiety. The best thing you can do is not get upset. Nothing more than an exploratory operation. Tests. Examination. Before the results had come through, his grandfather had been dead.
Trying to get information here had been little better: men and women, but mostly men, so used to obscuring the truth that it was second nature. Any question either ignored as by rote or weighed in the balance against any possible slur or taint of redress. Such records as existed were incomplete for the police’s purposes and jealously guarded. So they had gone off digging, never sure of what they were searching for, another member of staff with a professional or private grudge or family with grounds for retribution? One veil prized away only for another to fall into place.
Excited by Helen Minton’s gesture, Patel drove far too fast to the enquiry room and bullied his way on to the computer. Less than half an hour later he was knocking on the superintendent’s door.
Carew had shifted gears: the bursts of belligerence, the bravado were gone and now he was playing for time, a straight bat, content to sit there and give the same answers, short as possible, again and again and again. More than one eye on the clock.
“I was wondering, sir …?” Lynn Kellogg on her way across the CID room the moment Resnick appeared.
Resnick looked at her forlornly and shook his head.
“But the scalpel …”
“No way we can tie it in, nothing that puts him with the girl that lunchtime, any other time, nothing at all.”
“We’ve got his name in her diary, surely …?”
“Eighth most popular name, A and B group parents, kind of statistic Amanda Hooson would have loved. Medical school, university, probably full of them.”
“If it is somebody else, he must know who he is, why hasn’t he come forward?”
Resnick shrugged. “Who knows? But Naylor did come up with a student, positive he saw Carew sitting in the corner of the Buttery, watching the pool. Says he was on his own.”
Lynn Kellogg closed her eyes.
“His solicitor said it, I don’t like him. Neither do you. Sort that gets under your skin, blurs your judgment.”
“Karen Archer, sir, you have questioned him about her as well?”
“He swears not to have set eyes on her after he received his warning. Hasn’t heard from her, no idea where she is.”
“I don’t believe him.”
“Isn’t it what I just said? You don’t want to believe him.”
“I don’t think, where women are concerned, he’s the kind of man that ever gives up, lets go.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” Resnick said. “I hope to God you’re wrong. Meantime …”
“We’re releasing him.”
“Maybe soon,” Resnick said. “Not yet.”
Salt had screamed at the scrub nurse in theatre, fumbling with a clamp instead of slapping it down into his hand and the poor bugger on the table into a bleed that had his kidneys bobbing around like a coxless pair catching a crab. Of course, he’d apologized to her afterwards, no excuse for snapping like that and she’d said, no, it had been her fault, her fault entirely, but it had been her eyes that had told the truth.
Interesting, the way they were polarizing, attitudes towards him inside the hospital. Well, not interesting at all, really, take that back, more what you’d expect. Most of the nurses, female ones, the secretarial staff, social workers, their sympathies were with Helen, the other woman, used and then abused. Whereas the men-some of them it was nudge, nudge, wink, wink, sly old goose keeping a bit going on the side and pretty much getting away with it; others who’d found themselves on the receiving end of Helen’s tongue, they thought he was well shot of her. All brimstone and spare the treacle.
There was a message on his desk-he’d swear his secretary’s handwriting had become more crabbed since this had come out into the open-would he please get in touch with a Superintendent Skelton as soon as possible?
Soon as he felt up to it: later.
Right now what he needed was a brisk walk, fresh air. He knew some surgeons who kept a silver flask topped up with one form of spirits or another, a quick tipple between jobs to keep the hands steady. Or so they claimed. One of his former colleagues, now gone to meet the great consultant in the sky, hadn’t been above grabbing the mask when no one was looking and having a furtive go at the ether. Nine operations a day, that man, matter of routine. Of course, it had killed him. Heart. Four years short of fifty. Wife had remarried within six months, junior surgeon. New blood. Probably something going on there beforehand as well. Truth were known, they were all at it. Most of them. Human nature. What was that play? Restoration. Damn. English teacher had them read it at school. One that got the sack. Way of the World, that was it. True enough.
Bernard Salt stopped at the slip road to the car park and for only the second or third time since it had happened, he was thinking about the incident that evening after talking to Helen. A sound like a footstep, a movement, definitely a movement, and close, close to him. But then someone he knew had come along and after that, nothing. Which was in all probability what it had been.