George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (16 page)

‘I’ll murder her!’ George said feelingly and then stopped short.

‘I agree,’ Gus said. ‘Not the best sort of language to use at present, is it? Listen, doll, there’s more.’

‘More? How can there be more?’

‘Easily.’ He sounded suddenly grim. ‘We went on to her house — she lives in Barking — to see if there’d been any use made of the keys. It seemed to me that if someone was after the place in any way, they wouldn’t waste time. And I was right. It had been turned over very thoroughly indeed. We can’t know what’s missing, if anything, till she gets home and can look and tell us, but whoever it was really did an effective job. Not a stone unturned, as they say.’ He hesitated.

‘Ye Gods,’ George said weakly. ‘I think there’s more.’

‘Yup.’ He touched her hand again. ‘I tried to make this as easy as I could, sweetheart. That was why the jokes, but I have to say it’s not very funny. We went over to the lab then because Sheila was almost hysterical when she heard about her house. Our chap had to go back and talk to her, of course, though Night Sister wasn’t best pleased, but she was awake anyway because the thing she was really frantic about wasn’t her house so much as the lab. That was when she told us the lab keys had been in her bag. So, of course, we have to go there to see what’s what. I sent one of our blokes to make a recce. The main door is unlocked, he says, and he’s put a guard on the place, but he had the sense not to meddle at this stage. I need you to come and look, see what’s what, OK? After all, you’re the keyholder, and if there’d been a burglar alarm, we’d have to call you for that. So if you don’t mind?’

‘Of course.’ She almost fell out of bed in her hurry and was padding across the hall to her bathroom at a trot. He went to
the kitchen and put the kettle on and by the time she was dressed had a cup of coffee ready in a mug.

‘You can drink it in the car,’ he said briefly as she tried to refuse it, and took it with him as he hurried her down the stairs to where his old car was parked at the kerb. Usually it was a pleasure to her to ride in its leathery wooden panelled comfort, but this morning she was too preoccupied to notice. She had finished the coffee and was feeling a good deal more alert and less anxious by the time they reached the hospital, and had driven round the back to reach her laboratory.

The uniformed man outside the door nodded at her in a friendly fashion as she climbed out of the car. ‘Morning, Dr B.,’ he said. ‘Not a sign of anything this last half-hour.’

‘Thanks for the report,’ Gus said sardonically. ‘Glad to see a chap knows how to treat a superior officer.’

The man, a young constable, was deeply abashed. ‘Sorry, Super,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to make it easier for the doctor, like.’

‘No need to be so formal,’ Gus growled, but there was no animus there. ‘Guv’ll do well enough for me.’ He led the way towards the door and pushed it open. As though he’d called them there, other figures appeared round the side of the building to join him and George blinked.

‘Hey, does it take four — five of you to deal with this sort of thing?’ she said. ‘You must be longing to get in a bit of overtime.’

‘Unpaid, though.’ Michael Urquhart grinned at her. A recently promoted sergeant and always a good friend to George, he showed clearly that he was pleased to see her, and she was happy to see him. A very reliable guy, Mike.

‘I don’t want to take any chances, OK?’ Gus was in serious mode now, speaking in a low tone with no hint of the flippant chatterbox who had woken her. ‘I doubt there’s anyone still here, but all the same, you never know. Mike, you head straight down to the mortuary. And don’t be squeamish. I want every drawer checked, every body accounted for, get
me? You two, the main lab, that way. You come with me, Hagerty, and Dr B., you stay behind me. OK. Easy does it.’

They seemed to vanish into the building like wraiths, silently and with an amazing efficiency. George stood behind Gus waiting for him to make his move, which he did as soon as the others had vanished into the various sections he’d sent them to. Then he made straight for her office.

She had never been unduly fussy about the way her office was arranged. She had the usual Busy Lizzie plant drooping on the window-sill; the ever-present heap of unread or about-to-be-read medical and professional journals in the corner; and the shelves full of her most trusted texts. Her desk, however, piled high though it usually was with the detritus of the busy department, still had some charm about it. A small crystal clock Gus had given her as a Christmas present was there, alongside a rather chipped old glass jug stuffed with multicoloured plastic paper clips; and, in central place, a photograph of her mother beaming out of an antique silver frame with an absentmindedness that George had learned to live with, knowing her mother’s illness and how very far away her mind now was as a result. That was the first possession she looked over Gus’s shoulder to ensure was there; and its presence helped a lot. The broken plant on the floor, the way the papers from her desk had been scattered everywhere, the smashed coffee cups from her corner tray: she could bear all of that as long as Vanny’s picture was safe, and she darted into the room under Gus’s arm and seized it. He opened his mouth to protest, caught her eye and thought better of it.

‘A bit of tidying up to do, I guess,’ she said, keeping her voice as colourless as she could as she slid the picture into the big pocket of her skirt where it sat against her hip heavily and comforted her. ‘Let me know when I can start.’

‘SOCO’ll have to come first,’ Gus said in an abstracted sort of voice. ‘George, come over here, will you?’

He was crouching on the floor beside her big filing cabinet. She stared down over his shoulder and this time she was
angry. Very. There were her files, the records she had kept from the very beginning of her career as a pathologist, waiting for that magic day when she’d have time to write that definitive textbook, which would not only make her name in her field but also a great deal of money, since it would of course be a required text for every student in the entire world, lying in a pathetic heap. Photographs had been pulled out and left strewn around (and even the experienced DC Hagerty blenched at the sight of some of them) and papers lay scattered and crumpled higgledy-piggledy.

‘What the hell could he possibly want with these?’ she said furiously, staring at what looked like the wreck of the record of her whole career. ‘Why on earth should anyone want to do this? It’s just wanton —’

‘Are you sure?’ Gus peered at her sharply, his eyes bright, and for a moment she wanted to laugh even though anger still bubbled in her. There was something so attractively simian about him as he crouched there and looked up with those sharp, warm and very knowing eyes of his. ‘Not until you’ve been through lists and checked it all can you possibly know what’s what. If there’s anything missing then we’ll know what he was looking for. If nothing is then indeed this is mindless destructiveness.’

‘Or he didn’t find what he was after,’ DC Hagerty said, and there was a little silence in the room.

‘Oh, very clever, Hagerty’ Gus got to his feet and shook his head in heavy irony. ‘Will I ever get accustomed to the lightning minds of the best of the Bill what I have in my team? Will I ever cease to be blinded by their flashes of brilliance?’

‘Well, I only meant, Guv —’ Hagerty began.

‘You only meant to put the fear of God into the doctor here, right?’ Gus sounded savage. ‘On account of if they haven’t found what they want then they’ll be back to do so, right? You’re a thoughtful bugger and no error.’

‘Lay off, Gus,’ George said. She was crouching beside her
files. Her training prevented her from touching, but she was using her eyes very carefully ‘He’s absolutely right, of course, and I’m not stupid: I had realized the same thing myself. But I’ll tell you what. This isn’t quite as bad as it looks.’

‘Eh? How do you mean?’

‘Well, it’s funny, but only some of the files have been pulled out and scattered. See over here?’ She scrabbled in her pocket for a pencil and, using it carefully, lifted a corner of the uppermost file. ‘Under here. They’ve been pulled out and dropped on the floor, but no attempt’s been made to gut them, has there? Not like this one.’ She peered even closer. ‘It looks to me as though only this one’s been pulled about.’

‘And that one over there.’ Gus was on his knees beside her, also armed with a long pencil. ‘And is that another one there? See? You can just see the name on the top piece of paper. All the others are covered over with the mess.’

‘It’s the M file,’ she said. ‘M’s a huge one of course, it’s amazing how many names begin with it. And how many conditions.’

‘Conditions?’ He looked at her sharply.

‘Mmm. I use a filing system all my own,’ she said, looking a little defensive. ‘I find it works perfectly for me. If I have a special interest in mind, then I’ll file the notes under the name of the condition with a cross referral note to the right place in the file lettered by patient names. See this one on top: his name’s Gradalski, but he’s in the M file because he died of a myocardial infarction. I did him only last week, that’s why I remember.’

Gus sat back on his heels and shook his head at her. ‘Oh, George, George!’ he said disgustedly. ‘I might have known it! You’ve really cocked it up, haven’t you? Here was I thinking that once we had the initial letters of the files that had been gutted, we’d at least know this bugger was interested in people whose names begin with M or whatever. But it could be because they had a myo whatsit.’

‘Myocardial infarction,’ George said helpfully. ‘Or myasthenia gravis. Or a myeloid leukaemia, though that’s more likely to be in the L file. Or Marfan’s syndrome. That’s a rather rare condition that may lead to premature death in affected children. I’ve made rather a study of it, had several cases and —’

‘Or Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all,’ Gus said, turning away. ‘Well, there it is. It’s going to take you longer than you hoped to get this stuff sorted out, isn’t it, so that you can tell me what’s missing?’

‘I suppose so.’ She looked mournfully at the mess and then straightened up. ‘But dammit, how am I supposed to know what’s missing just by looking? There are years of records here. I brought some with me when I came here, and then there are those I’ve done since I arrived.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s a master list on a floppy disc anywhere?’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘Why should there be? This was just my private collection. No need to make a great fuss over it. I just had to open the filing cabinet and there it all was.’

‘There it all was, past tense, indeed,’ he said. Then he growled over his shoulder: ‘Well?’ as the door opened.

The rest of the team were there, all reporting that there had been no other damage done anywhere.

‘The main lab’s all right as far as I can tell,’ DC Morley said. ‘If you’d just come and take a dekko, Dr B., and tell us for sure?’

‘Of course.’ She escaped gladly, feeling positively guilty because she hadn’t protected her files on a computer, if only to make life easy for Gus now. But why should she? It made no sense …

It wasn’t until she’d taken a look at the main lab and reported that, indeed, nothing had been disturbed, and done the same down in the mortuary with Mike Urquhart, that she remembered. And came belting up the stairs from the basement calling for Gus at the top of her voice.

‘Gus!’ she called. ‘Hey, Gus! I’d forgotten, dammit. It comes from getting up in such a hurry so early. Listen, last night…’

‘Yeah?’ He looked at her hopefully.

‘Well, last night, I was looking for notes as well. I was in here late, and I took away one set that I was interested in. I didn’t feel up to going through it here, so I took it home. So that’s one we haven’t lost.’

‘So what? I mean, does that help us to know what he
was
after? What you might have lost?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I just thought that it might. You see, it was the notes for Lally Lamark’s post-mortem. She was one of those three we dealt with last week. The suspected suicide, remember? Maybe if we look for the other two files, we’ll get some idea? I mean, if they’re missing …’

‘If they’re missing, then we may indeed have one end of a piece of string in our hands,’ he said. He grinned suddenly, carving his face into agreeable crags. ‘Listen, George, the minute SOCO finishes here, we’ll get down to the search, right? And I’ll tell you what. I’ll help you.’

‘I was afraid of that,’ she said.

Despite his offer of help with the files, in the event Gus had to go back to Ratcliffe Street and leave her to it The SOCO left her office a little before nine, gloomily telling everyone that they shouldn’t get too hopeful on account he’d seen some messed-up prints in his time but this was really ridiculous.

George had been a tad affronted at that. ‘Well, what do you expect? I dare say my office is a bit on the undusted and unpolished side, but that’s because we’ve got more important things to do here than housework. People’s fingerprints would pile up. But you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. I’m pretty well the only person who uses that cabinet so you ought to be able to find something you can work on if you look properly.’

‘It’s not that easy when they’re umpteen layers deep,’ he muttered as he went off.

Gus grinned at her. ‘Don’t be too offended, doll. He’s always like that: a real misery. Anyway, I didn’t expect to get much from prints. Something tells me this isn’t a professional job, which means we won’t have the prints on file. It’s an enthusiastic amateur who made that mess.’

As George, only partly mollified, settled down on her haunches to start the sorting, the phone rang. Gus took it. The call was for him and he listened, grunted, spoke in a few monosyllables, said, ‘I’m on my way,’ and hung up.

‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘Left to do it on my own again.’ But she didn’t really mind. To have Gus around helping with this job might be more trouble than assistance; she had her filing system clear in her own head, but having to explain it in all its labyrinthine detail was more than she fancied doing. He’d probably jeer at it anyway. So she smiled at him happily enough.