That part was his job.
53
‘I’m going to make an incision here – I’ll go in through your Caesarean scar – then pull this part back.’
Ruth is sitting on an examination table. She’s wearing her bra and her underpants. Her high heels are still on and she’s resting her feet delicately, so as not to go through the strip of paper towel and mark the leather underneath. The room is well lit, airy and wood-panelled, with the surgeon’s degrees framed and mounted. Outside a gardener is cutting the grass. No doubt about it, the clinic is top drawer. Not the sort of place that asks for money up front.
‘We need to expose the muscles under here.’ The surgeon lifts up the flesh around her abdomen. ‘Then I’ll pull them together like this. Remove a little of this fat and skin here. When you come round there’ll be a couple of drains – one on either side. Just for the first forty-eight hours. Sometimes with an abdomectomy this muscle here, your rectus muscle,’ he drew his finger down the front of her belly, ‘can get a bit sore afterwards. It might make you feel nauseous too so I’ll inject into it while you’re under. OK?’
‘OK.’
‘You know there’ll be a bit of discomfort?’
A bit of discomfort here? In the Rothersfield clinic with its fancy landscaped gardens and bellboys in smart little hats? With satellite telly in all the rooms and champagne cocktails on the menu if you’re feeling well enough? She can deal with that. She pulls on her T-shirt and watches him squirt Spirigel on his hands, wipe them with a starched towel and go back to the big leather-topped desk. He’s not good-looking. Not really. A bit dowdy. But he’ll be loaded probably. Just the sort she needs.
He opens her notes and scribbles a few words with a scratchy Montblanc. Makes circles around the stomach of an outlined diagram. Pulls out a sheet of pink paper and starts filling in boxes.
‘Do you smoke?’
Ruth wriggles into her skirt. ‘No.’
‘Drink?’
‘Only if you’re having one.’
He gives a small, pained smile. ‘How many units do you drink each week?’
‘I don’t know. I’m a social drinker.’
‘So, ten to twenty-one drinks a week?’
‘That’ll do it.’
‘Live alone?’
‘Now it sounds like you’re asking me for a date.’
‘It’s a serious question. We need to know if you’ll have someone to care for you on your discharge from the clinic.’
‘Yes. I mean – I do. I live on my own. But I could arrange for my son to come. He’d be happy to be there.’ She buttons her skirt. This guy might be minted but he’s got no sense of humour. She gets off the table and takes the seat opposite him, crossing her legs and tensing the muscles so her calves look nice. She rests her fingernails on her knee.
‘My, uh, my niece works here. She recommended you.’
‘Did she?’ He doesn’t look up. ‘Kind of her.’
‘She and I are very close. She tells me everything. She confided in me.’
‘Confided?’
Still writing. Still not interested.
‘Said she thought you were one of the best surgeons around.’
He looks up at this. ‘Thank you. Always nice to hear.’
‘I think she spoke to you about…’
‘About a discount?’
She breathes out, relieved. ‘That’s right. A discount. She did speak to you.’
‘Yes, she did. Marsha will deal with it. My secretary. When you make the appointment she’ll take you through all that. I’ve got some spaces late June.’
Ruth narrows her eyes. ‘When do I pay?’
‘Marsha will invoice you.’
Her heart jumps. Invoices take days. Weeks. Time to milk Little Miss PI a bit more. ‘When?’ she says.
The surgeon looks up. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he says. ‘We’ll be in touch after the procedure.’
54
Rothersfield clinic wasn’t dissimilar from the Farleigh Park Hall clinic to look at, Caffery thought, with its oak-panelled waiting rooms, marble staircase and rooms with sliding glass doors that led out on to sweeping lawns. But there the similarities ended. Here, there was a porter service, five-course meals chosen from handwritten menus, and no one expected you to clean the toilets as part of your treatment. Chauffeurs waited in the driveway in their Mercedes and Bentleys for their rich employers to recover from their facelifts.
In a little office at the back of the building overlooking a knot garden, where one or two patients were wandering in their towelling robes, the nurse, Darcy Lytton, was waiting for him. Not yet changed for work, she looked the part of the girl rumpled from a night with a boyfriend: she wore scruffy Atticus skinny jeans, a studded belt and a black T-shirt with the words ‘Don’t make me kill you’ slashed across the chest. Her eye makeup was last night’s too: it was smudged into the folds under her brown eyes. She sat with her hands jammed between her knees, biting her lip. She’d been crying.
‘What’s happening?’ She’d got up as he came in. ‘Did she kill herself? Did she leave a note?’
‘Darcy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m Jack. Jack Caffery.’
She shook the hand he held out. Her palm was damp, cold. ‘Did she say why? In the note?’
‘Sit down.’
She did so and he sat next to her, his feet set slightly apart, his knee not far from hers, his head bent down a little so he could look up into her face.
‘It’s hit you hard, hasn’t it?’
‘It’s not exactly what I was, y’know, expecting when I came into work this morning.’
‘You up to talking?’
‘I’ve said a lot of it already – I’ve told them how I…’ She turned smudgy eyes to Caffery. ‘I keep thinking there was something I should’ve done.’
He put a hand on her shoulder. Stupid thing to do, maybe, because strictly speaking he shouldn’t even be here on his own with her. You never knew what accusations people were capable of. The East European girls in the Dover pens had developed a habit of waiting until they were on their own with a cop, shoving their hands inside their panties, then wiping their fingers on the cop’s hands before he knew what was happening. Screaming assault – and who was going to deny it when the DNA popped up from the swabs? Cops were taught to travel in pairs these days. But this girl looked like she hadn’t the resources left to go to the toilet on her own, let alone accuse him of assault.
‘I’m police too,’ he said. ‘But the questions I’ve got might be different from the ones they asked you on the phone. Is that OK?’
‘What was in the note?’ Darcy pressed a balled-up handkerchief to her nose. ‘The suicide note?’
‘She was unhappy. Said she felt abandoned.’
‘Not abandoned. I just can’t believe it. She had loads of friends. Her parents are great, really cool – for parents, y’know. And Paul was coming off the rigs. It was all she could talk about. She’d spent most of the week getting ready.’
‘You knew her well?’
‘Years ago, we used to do everything together. We had a bit of a – I don’t know – a bust-up about six months ago and since then we’ve kind of avoided each other, but not seriously, you know. We kept it light after that so we didn’t have to talk about the argument. But we’d still socialize at work – laugh and gossip and that.’
‘Control tells me you last saw her yesterday lunchtime.’
‘In the locker room. I was getting changed, ready to meet my date. She was going to the loo. I’m standing there looking in the mirror and I’ve seen her come out and wash her hands and… and that’s why I’m sort of…’ She bit her lip. ‘That’s why I’m sort of screwed up by it all because I think she wanted to tell me something and I was in a hurry so I didn’t listen. I thought about calling her later, but when I did her phone was switched off. I didn’t leave a message.’
‘Her phone was off when she was found and the log was wiped. Was she in the habit of wiping the log?’