He felt his throat swell, as if he’d swallowed a naga chilli whole. He shook his head, pushing his plate away. ‘I just want to do my job.’ Getting the words out was a strain.
‘I know that.’ Carol spoke gently, almost inaudible against the background noise. ‘But I think you’d do it better if you acknowledged your need to come to terms with your history.’
‘Maybe.’ He drank some beer and cleared his throat. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He managed a weak smile. ‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’
She shook her head. ‘How can I? I don’t like to see you hurting because you’re in denial.’
Tony laughed. ‘Excuse me, but I’m supposed to be the psychologist here.’
Carol pushed his plate back towards him. ‘And I’m a good learner. Now eat your dinner and let me tell you what I’ve managed to find out.’
‘You win,’ he said meekly, reaching for his fork.
‘It’s not like it’s anything approaching the whole picture,’ Carol said. ‘But it’s somewhere to start. The first good thing is that he didn’t have a criminal record. He even had a clean driving licence, though he did have a couple of speeding convictions in 2002. Probably down to the installation of speed cameras on the nearest main road.’
‘And then he learned to be careful.’ Tony slowly began to eat, one tiny morsel at a time.
‘The second good thing - at least, I think it was probably good for him, if not for the people who were close to him - is that his death was very quick. No lingering illness, no long period of debilitation. The cause of death was a massive heart attack. He’d been at some sort of canal boat rally and he was walking back to his boat when he collapsed on the quayside. By the time the ambulance arrived, he was beyond help.’
Tony imagined what that must have been like. The paralysing grip of sudden pain. The loss of control. The agonising understanding that this was it. The darkness descending. The terrible loneliness, the absence of anyone he cared about. No chance to say goodbye. No chance to make amends. ‘Did he know he was likely to have a heart attack?’
‘Not really. He’d been diagnosed with ischaemic heart disease, but it didn’t seem to have had any impact on the way he lived. He played golf, he spent a lot of time pottering about on the canals in his narrowboat, and he went to work. He smoked a cigar most evenings, he drank the best part of a bottle of red wine every day and he enjoyed eating out in expensive restaurants several times a week. Not the way you behave if you’ve got an eye on a long and healthy life.’
Tony shook his head. ‘How did you find this stuff out?’
‘I’m a DCI. I called the coroner’s officer.’
‘And they just told you all this? Didn’t they wonder why you wanted to know?’ Tony knew he shouldn’t be surprised by the lack of privacy the state offered its citizens, but there were still times when it amazed him how easy it was to garner information that was supposed to be confidential. ‘You could have been anybody,’ he added.
‘He did wonder, yes. I reassured him that we didn’t think there was anything untoward about Edmund Blythe’s death, just that we were looking into the possibility that someone on our patch had stolen his identity. So naturally I needed some details.’ She grinned and helped herself to a spoonful of tarka daal.
‘You’re very devious. I’d never have thought of that.’
Carol raised her eyebrows. ‘You’re one to talk. I’ve seen you be more twisted than a corkscrew in the interview room. I’d never come up with some of the stuff that comes second nature to you when you’re trying to get inside someone else’s skin.’
He tipped his head in acknowledgement of her accuracy. ‘True. Well, thanks for that. You’re right, it’s not the end of the world to know this.’
‘There is more. You up for it?’
Again he felt wariness rising, a constriction in his gut. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything in what I’ve found out that could cause you a problem,’ Carol said carefully. ‘I wouldn’t be pushing you so hard if I thought it was going to fuck you up.’
He looked across the restaurant at the crammed tables. Judging by the faces of the diners, all human life was here. Romance, business, disagreement, friendship, joy, sadness, family ties, first dates. Everyone in the room had the potential for all of these aspects of relationships. What was he so afraid of? What could hurt him about a dead man who’d known nothing about him when he’d been alive? He turned back to Carol. Her eyes seemed not to have left his face. He was, he thought, lucky to have her in his life, even if her persistence sometimes drove him crazy. ‘OK,’ he said.
‘He was a smart bloke, your father—’
‘Not my father,’ Tony interrupted, instantly angered. ‘Please, Carol. No amount of pushing’s going to make that acceptable.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It wasn’t meant to be a push. I just wasn’t thinking, that’s all. What do you want me to call him?’
Tony shrugged. ‘Edmund? Blythe?’
‘His friends called him Arthur.’
‘Then Arthur will do.’ He glared at his food. ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you. But I can’t think of him that way. I really can’t. I’ve said it before: “father” implies a relationship. Good or bad, honest or dishonest, loving or hating. But we didn’t have any kind of relationship.’
Carol’s expression was apology enough. ‘Arthur was a smart bloke. He set up his company, Surginc, a couple of years after you were born. I’m not sure what he was doing before that. The woman I spoke to at Surginc has worked there for thirty-odd years, but she didn’t know anything about Arthur’s life before he came to Worcester except that he came from up north somewhere.’
A twist of a smile. ‘That would be Halifax, we assume, since that’s where my mother was living at the time. So what does this Surginc do?’
‘It’s all a bit technical, but the gist of it is that they make disposable surgical instruments. Where Arthur was ahead of the game was that he developed a series of recyclable disposable instruments made from a combination of plastics and metal. So instead of them being single use, the materials could be reclaimed and reused. Don’t ask me what’s so special about the process they use, but it’s apparently unique. He had a patent on it. One of several he held, apparently.’ Her smile softened the lines of her face, reminding him of why people often underestimated her toughness. ‘Turns out you’re not the first innovative thinker in your bloodline.’
Against all his determination, Tony couldn’t help feeling pleased at Carol’s news. ‘For all her faults, so’s my mother. It’s good to know I don’t get all my creativity from her.’
Carol’s expression tightened at the mention of his mother. Tony wasn’t surprised. The antagonism between the two women had sparked on first meeting. Tony had been in hospital, recovering from a brutal attack at the hands of a Bradfield Moor patient. He’d been in no fit state to act as a buffer between the two women, and the fact that Carol had intervened to stop Vanessa ripping him off over Arthur Blythe’s estate had cemented their mutual loathing. ‘Well, there’s one big difference between Arthur and Vanessa,’ she said. ‘From all accounts, Arthur was one of the good guys. As well as being smart, he was apparently a good employer - his firm even had a profit-sharing system with the workers. He was very sociable, good company, generous. He employed about twenty-five people, but he knew all about their families. Always remembered their kids’ names, that sort of thing. When he sold the company two years ago, he took the entire staff and their partners off to a country-house hotel for a weekend break. No expense spared.’ Carol paused, expectant.
Tony summoned up an anodyne response. ‘No wonder they liked him.’