“I do, but I’m not telling you.” Maeve walked determinedly into the hall, bringing Jerome with her. “Doctor Pitman is a fine man. He came here yesterday, without even being called, just to make sure I was all right and to give me his condolences—and now you want to go to his home and accuse him of stealing some dumb little box.”
“I’ve forgotten all about the box,” Jerome lied. “All I want to do is ask the doctor if he prescribed any unusual drugs for your father.”
Maeve opened the front door, creating a rectangle of multicoloured brilliance. “Mr Jerome, when I contacted the Examiner it was to let the people of this town know that my father wasn’t a whisky soak. It was not to launch you on a new career as a fantasy writer, busybody and general nuisance—and if I hear of you annoying Doctor Pitman I’ll complain to your editor and do my best to get you sacked.”
A few seconds later, without his being sure of how it had come about, Jerome found himself alone outside the house. During their first meeting Maeve Starzynski had claimed to be quick-tempered, and now he knew exactly what she meant. Something about the tone of her voice warned him that she was not inclined to idle threats, that she was quite capable of going to Anne Kruger and demanding his dismissal. As he went sideways down the high steps, easing the strain on his left knee, it came to him that anybody with a normal quota of commonsense would drop the matter right there. The trouble was that he was no longer in control of his actions. The quiet egotist in him had heard just enough to become an obsessional taskmaster whose orders simply had to be obeyed.
Jerome got into his car, selected DIRECTORY on the communications panel and asked for Pitman’s home address. A second later the machine said, Four-eight-four Hampshire Drive, Albany, Whiteford.”
Jerome nodded in satisfaction and drove off. Albany was an exclusive enclave where, as a kind of reaction to the strict grid pattern of the rest of the town, the roads had been laid out in meandering curves and given English county names instead of numbers. It took him several minutes to get there and to locate the address on a tree-lined avenue where the houses could only be glimpsed behind banks of shrubbery. He drove into the first opening of a semi-circular drive and stopped outside a substantial brick-built house which was clothed in Persian ivy. The doors of the adjacent garage were open and he could see that it was empty—first intimation that the doctor was not at home.
Jerome went to the front entrance and pressed a white ceramic button set in a ring of antique brass. Chimes sounded within, but nobody came to the door. Unable to face the idea of being brought to a standstill in his investigation he pressed the button again and again, straining his ears for a response. More than a minute went by and the only movement was the flowing and fragmenting of his own reflection in the pebbled glass of the door. Jerome was about to admit defeat when a man’s voice came from directly behind him, stopping his breath.
“Doctor Bob ain’t here,” it said.
Jerome turned quickly and saw a young man who was dressed in work clothes and carrying garden shears. He was almost bald, a few wisps of colourless hair lying across his scalp, and his complexion had the silty coloration which comes when very pale skin is overlaid with a tan. Jerome received the impression that the young man was no stranger to illness.
“Can you tell me where the doctor is?” he said. “Do I need to go to the Medical Arts Building?”
“Hell no, you don’t need to do nothin’ like that.” The young man laughed as though Jerome had made some comical blunder. “Doctor Bob only drove over to Mason’s to pick out some new shirts for himself. “Ten, fifteen minutes should take care of it.”
“In that case I’ll wait in my car.”
“What you wanna do a thing like that for? You’ll melt away to a grease spot in there ’fore long. You come round here and I’ll show you where to wait.” The young man beckoned to Jerome and without waiting for his reaction walked away and passed out of sight at the side of the house. Jerome followed him to the rear of the premises where there was a sizeable and well-tended garden which featured box hedges and beds of white roses.
“You go in there and take a seat.” The young man indicated open french windows leading to a shady room which was furnished as a study or office. “You make yourself comfortable in there.”
“I don’t think I…” Jerome hesitated, seeking a tactful way to explain that he was loth to enter the room on the authority of a gardener.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” the young man said, unoffended. “All you got to say is Sammy Birkett gave you the okay. Doctor Bob leaves all this kinda thing to me. Honest.”
“Thank you, Sammy.” Jerome went into the coolness of the house and sat on a leather chair facing a knee-hole desk. The patient sound of shears from the garden showed that Birkett had resumed work. The walls of the room were largely taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with a mixture of medical texts and general works. Between the bookcases were dozens of framed certificates, old family photographs and pale mezzotints of sporting scenes. A chess table sat in front of a slate fireplace. It was the kind of room which had either vanished from the electronic age or was consciously maintained for status reasons, but Jerome sensed it was Pitman’s natural working environment and he found himself predisposed to like the doctor.
He waited for ten minutes and then, becoming edgy, got up and examined the photographs in the hope of identifying Pitman. In several of the groups was a likely candidate—a white-haired, apple-cheeked figure in a conservative black suit—but there were no captions to confirm his guess. As the minutes continued to slip by Jerome, although still in the grip of his compulsion, began to be oppressed by mental images of Anne Kruger’s face, each time looking angrier than before. Feelings of panic gripped him every time he remembered he was risking his job by being in Pitman’s house, and what made matters worse was that he had no genuine hope of having his theory proved right. It was just that he had to have it proved wrong before he would be his own man again.
His mounting agitation drove Jerome to prowl around the room, and it was on his third circuit that he observed the envelope with the semi-circular stamp in a waste bin beside the desk. The only source he knew for stamps of that shape was Amity, the USA/UK condominium in the Antarctic. Never having actually seen one of the stamps, Jerome picked up the envelope and was surprised to note that it had come from the Amity headquarters of CryoCare Incorporated.
In the last decade there had been renewed interest in the freeze-preservation of disease victims in the old hope that medical science would one day be able to revive and cure them. CryoCare maintained a body storage and research facility in the Antarctic, where natural conditions aided the work, but in spite of undeniable progress the whole venture was suspect in Jerome’s eyes. He had an instinctive distrust of any scheme which involved people in mortal fear being separated from large sums of money. Pitman having dealings with CryoCare hardly squared with the picture Jerome had formed of a benevolent family doctor of the old school, but perhaps the envelope had contained nothing more than promotional literature. Frowning, Jerome dropped it back into the waste bin and walked to the window.
The young gardener was just a few paces away. He had paused in his work and was staring into the distance, his head tilted as if he were straining to hear faint voices. Again Jerome received the impression that Birkett had been battling against illness or was recovering from an operation. He studied the young man sympathetically, suddenly appreciative of the fact that his own ailments could have been much worse. Birkett, unaware of being observed, tucked his shears under his arm and took a small box from the hip pocket of his jeans. He opened it and removed a pill-sized object which he put in his mouth.