“Well, he always enjoys working with you.”
A strangely gratified Lewis made no reply.
“So?”
“Well, if it’s OK with Morse...”
“Which it is.”
“I’ll give him a ring.”
“No, you won’t. He’s tired, isn’t he? Needs a rest. Give him a bit of time to himself — you know, crosswords, booze...”
“Wagner, sir. Don’t forget his precious Wagner. He’s just bought another recording of that Ring Cycle stuff, so he told me.”
“Which recording’s that?”
“Conductor called ‘Sholty,’ I think.”
“Mm...” Strange pointed to three bulging green box-files stacked on the side of his desk. “Little bit of reading there. All right? Chance for you to get a few moves ahead of Morse.”
Lewis got to his feet, picked up the files, and held them awkwardly in front of him, his chin clamping the top one firm.
“I’ve never been even one move in front of him, sir.”
“No? Don’t you underestimate yourself, Lewis! Let others do it for you.”
Lewis managed a good-natured grin. “Not many people manage to get a move ahead of Morse.”
“Oh, really? Just a minute! Let me hold the door for you... And you’re not quite right about what you just said, you know. There are one or two people who just occasionally manage it.”
“Perhaps you’re right, sir. I’ve just not met one of ‘em, that’s all.”
“You have though,” said Strange quietly.
Lewis’s eyes turned quizzically as he maneuvered his triple burden through the door.
That same evening, Lewis had just finished his eggs and chips, had trawled the last slice of brown bread across the residual HP sauce, and was swallowing the last mouthful of full-cream cold milk, when he heard the call from above:
“Dad? Da — ad?”
Lewis looked down at the (presumably problematical) first sentence of his son’s A-level French Prose Composition: “Another bottle of this excellent wine, waiter!”
“Easy enough, that, isn’t it?”
“What gender’s ‘bottle’?”
“How am I supposed to know? What do you think I bought you that dictionary for?”
“Left it at school, didn’t I!”
“So?”
“So you mean you don’t know?”
“You’re brighter than I thought, son.”
“Can’t you guess?”
“Either masculine or feminine, sure to be.”
“That’s great.”
“Feminine, say? So it’s, er, ‘Garçon! Une autre bouteille de cette—’”
“No! You’re useless, Dad! If you say ‘Une autre bouteille,’ you mean a different bottle of wine.”
“Oh.”
“You say ‘Encore une bouteille de’ whatever it is.”
“Why do you ever ask me to help you?”
“Agh! Forget it! Like I say, you’re bloody useless.”
Lewis had never himself read Bleak House and, unlike Morse, would not have known the soothing secret of counting up to however-many. And in truth he felt angry and belittled as he walked silently down the stairs, picked up the box-files from the table in the entrance hall, walked past the living room, where Mrs. Lewis sat deeply submerged in a TV soap, and settled himself down at the kitchen table, where he began to acquaint himself with the strangely assorted members of the Harrison family — wife, husband, daughter, son — four of the principal players in the Lower Swinstead case.
He concentrated as well as he could, in spite of those cruel words still echoing in his brain. And after a while he found himself progressively engaged in the earlier, more grievous agonies of other people: of Frank, the husband; of Sarah, the daughter; of Simon, the son; and of Yvonne, the mother, who had been murdered so brutally in the Cotswold village of Lower Swinstead, Oxon.
Chapter six
The English country gentleman galloping after a fox — the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
At first he’d felt some reluctance about an immediate interview with her. But finally he decided that earlier rather than later was probably best; and in tones considerably less peremptory than those in which Strange had summoned Lewis three days earlier, he called her to his office at 4:30 P.M.
At which time she stood silent and still for a few seconds at the door before knocking softly, feeling like a schoolgirl outside the headmistress’s study.
“Come in!”
She entered and sat, as directed, in the chair opposite him, across the desk.
Professor Turner was a fair-complexioned, mild-mannered medic, in his early sixties — the internationally renowned chief-guru of the Radcliffe Infirmary’s Diabetes Centre in Oxford.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
Yes, he wanted to see her; but he also wanted to put her rather more at ease.
“Look, we’re probably going to be together at lots of do’s these next few months — years, perhaps — so, please, let’s forget this ‘Sir’ business, shall we? Please call me ‘Robert.’”
Sarah Harrison, a slimly attractive, brown-eyed brunette in her late twenties, felt her shoulder muscles relax a little.
Not for long.
“I’ve sat in with you once or twice, haven’t I?”
“Three times.”
“And I think you’re going to be good, going to be up to it, you know what I mean?”
“Thank you.”
“But you’re not quite good enough yet.”
“I’d hoped I was improving.”
“Certainly. But you’re still strangely naive, I’m sorry to say. You seem to believe everything your patients tell you!”
“There’s not much else to go on, is there?”
“Oh, but there is! There’s a certain healthy and necessary skepticism; and then there’s experience. You’ll soon realize all this. What I’m saying is that you might as well learn it now rather than later.”
“Is there anything particular...?”
“Things, plural. I’m thinking of what they tell you about their blood-sugar records, about their sexual competence, about their diet, about their alcohol intake. You see, the only thing they can’t fool you about is their weight.”
“And their blood pressure.”
Turner smiled gently at his pupil. “I haven’t got quite as much faith as you in our measurements of blood pressure.”
“But they don’t all of them make their answers up.”
“Not all of them, no. It’s just that we all like to pretend a bit. We all tend to say we’re fine, even if we’re feeling lousy. Don’t we?”
“I suppose so.”
“And our main job” (Turner spoke with a quiet authority) “is to give information — and to exert some sort of influence — about the way our patients cope with what, as you know, is potentially a very serious illness.”
Sarah said nothing. Just sat there. A little humiliated.
And he continued: “There are a good many patients here who are professional liars. Some of them I’ve known for years, and they’ve known me. We tell each other lies, all right. But it doesn’t matter — because we know we’re telling each other lies... Anyway, that’s enough about that.” (Turner looked down at her folder.) “I see you’ve got Mr. David Mackenzie on your list next Monday. I’ll sit in with you on him. I think he did once tell me his date of birth correctly, but he makes everything else up as he goes along. You’ll enjoy him!”