The Operator (Bruce and Bennett Crime Thriller 2) (10 page)

Mr Rohan had a bald dome, a fuzz of grey hair
round his ears and a neat little goatee beard which was still brown touched
with grey. He had gentle brown eyes and a middle eastern appearance. His
manners were rather formal, and he was indeed wearing a bow tie, yellow and
brown plaid to match his smart brown suit.

A nurse bustled in with a tray of tea in china
cups, probably this tea had never seen the inside of a machine, and some good
but boring biscuits. Erica was glad she’d borrowed her respectable outfit
again, the one she’d been wearing when she found Kingston’s body. At this rate
it would be worth investing in her own dowdy disguise.

He sipped at his tea, black. She did the same,
thinking the chance of soya milk was slim to none and not wanting to trigger
any prejudices about tree-hugging yoghurt-knitting veggies which might make him
reluctant to speak to her.

‘So, you are writing an article on my late
colleague for the local paper. A dreadful business, dreadful. I believe you
found him? I hope you are recovering from the shock.’

‘I’m trying to take a positive attitude, Mr Rohan.
It helps to do something, to tell his story and make people realise what kind
of man he really was.’

That was safely ambiguous enough.

‘Well, he was a fine surgeon. He’d been here for seven
years, I’ve been here a little longer. He specialised in hip and knee joint
replacements originally but lately he did more and more work on tibia
fractures. Always a challenge, the blood supply being so sparse in that area,
and such common bones to break in road traffic accidents or sports injuries. Comminuted,
compound fractures often result....I’m more of a spinal man myself. You can
contact the patients’ groups, I’ll get the office to give you the numbers.’

‘I’ve already got those, but thank you. What I’d
like from you is some idea of what kind of a colleague he was - the man, as
well as the surgeon.’

Rohan looked a bit puzzled. ‘Well, all I can tell
you is he was an intelligent, able man... come in!’

The last was a response to a knock at the door. A
young doctor came in, still in the white coat stage of the metamorphosis into
consultant, and put a folder on the desk.

‘The results you wanted,’ he said to Rohan. He
looked Chinese, with neat features, soft black hair like soot, his colouring
set off by the extreme whiteness of the coat which looked new. A baby doc! A
cute baby doc. Oh, yes. He looked back at her and smiled slightly in a reserved
way. She wished she wasn’t wearing the horrible shapeless dowdy clothes.

‘This is Dr. Lau,’ Rohan said. ‘Jamie, this is
Erica Bruce from the
Evening Guardian
. She’s doing a follow-up piece on
Mr Kingston.’

The young man’s smile remained, but she thought she
detected a tightening of the skin over those lovely cheekbones. Clearly Mr, or
was it Dr, Lau was subordinate to Rohan and Kingston; maybe he would bear close
investigation. It would be a pleasure, as well as a duty, to find out what was
under that white coat.

‘Perhaps I could talk to you too, if you can spare
me the time, that is,’ she ventured.

‘Erm maybe.’ His head went down, and he looked a
bit awkward. Shy, or something to hide?

‘Our junior doctors hardly get time to sleep,’
laughed Rohan. ‘They don’t even have a social life, eh, Jamie?’

Jamie politely acknowledged his superior’s remark
and excused himself. Dammit! Well Jamie you can run but you can’t hide.

‘It’s a tough time for him, or any young doctor,’
mused Rohan, ‘but he’s young enough to take it. When you get to my age and
experience, the pace isn’t so hectic. Time for other things.’

‘You mean, the better you get at this job, the
less you do it?’

He looked startled. ‘I suppose you could say
that,’ he said, still charming but with more of an effort.

Careful Erica! ‘Mr Kingston had a thriving private
practice, I believe.’

‘Yes, he had a lot of contacts in the Arab nations
and elsewhere. He went out to Saudi when he had leave from the hospital, and of
course he saw local private patients, often at his home in the first instance
and for follow up, then he’d operate on them at the private Hospital in town.
He was a most sought-after surgeon, with a fine reputation.’

‘Both here and in his private practice, you mean?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘So there were never any complaints or
controversies about him?’

‘Certainly not.’ Rohan was looking less genial
now. ‘And now that he is dead would not be the time to discuss it if there were.’

‘Of course not,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I only
meant, it’s impressive that all his patients were satisfied, considering how
many he helped.’

‘Yes it is.’ He sounded more relaxed. ‘Orthopaedic
surgery is a fine branch of medicine, young lady. It may not be as, hem, ‘sexy’
as brain or heart surgery, but the work we do getting people mobile again after
accidents is really worthwhile. And arthritis takes a terrible toll on the old,
even the middle aged and the young. Not only crippling, but painful too. To see
someone walk again without pain or recover from serious injury is a true
privilege.’

His sincerity sounded genuine enough, she had no
reason to doubt him, and felt a little ashamed of even mentioning complaints or
controversies. But she would have to harden her heart a little if she was going
to get anywhere with this.

She switched off her recorder and thanked Rohan
for his help.

‘I’ll be visiting all the spheres Mr Kingston was
involved in, the Golf Club, for instance. Did you play together at all?’

‘No,’ he said firmly, getting up to see her out. ‘I
know nothing about golf. We did not mix outside the hospital, and very little
in it really. He had his patients, I had mine. But as far as I’m concerned, he
was a valued colleague.’

In other words, Rohan knew no ill of him, and
nothing at all about the man himself. Or that was all he was willing to say. The
profession always closed ranks against outsiders, whatever rivalries there
might be.

The waiting areas had been filling up steadily
while she was in Rohan’s office. Fracture clinic. She felt very conspicuous
walking past them, a queue jumper, with all her limbs in working order. She
tried to look like a sales rep for bandages as she walked past the suspicious
eyes. There was a woman standing behind a loaded refreshments trolley. She wore
a bright overall and a smile to match. An ‘excellent woman’, if Erica was any
judge, and as a Barbara Pym devotee, she could spot the species a mile off.
Clearly she was a volunteer with the Friends of the Hospital. Erica chose a
mini carton of apple juice as the least harmful thing available, provided she
was careful putting the straw in through the little dimple of foil. They tended
to have a premature ejaculation all over you if you squeezed them too much, and
everyone knows what a nuisance that can be. A fat woman sitting nearby must
have read her mind, because she called over,

‘Be careful, pet! Mine’s just shot out all over
me, like a little lad’s willy!’

Everyone in earshot laughed, the trolley woman
rather forcedly she thought.

‘This is certainly an improvement on the
departments I usually go to,’ she said to the trolley lady, but loud enough for
anyone else to join in. ‘Horrible machine tea there and no other choice.’

The trolley woman beamed.

‘We have a shop too, further in by the general
entrance, with flowers, newspapers and so on. And we go round the wards. Do you
know, some of the old dears never have a visitor. No-one to bring them any
treats.’

‘Aw, what a shame, and I expect some patients
spend a long time in wards like, oh, orthopaedics,’ Erica said cunningly.

‘They do. There’s Mrs O’Rourke. Broke her hip, but
she’s never been able to get up yet, complications you see, and the longer she
lies there, the harder it’ll be to ever get her going again, poor old soul.’

‘Maybe I could visit her if you don’t think she’d mind.
Take her some little extras.’ And get the patient’s eye view of Kingston.

‘I’m sure she’d be glad to have a visitor,’ said
the trolley woman warmly.

‘Ginger marmalade,’ announced the fat lady. ‘Always
on about it she was, when I was on Ward 5. Said it kept her regular. Missed it
in here. They give yer pills instead that don’t work.’

Erica felt she should have been trying to spread
the word about alternative medicine while she was there, handing out samples of
remedies for arthritis and so on. It would be a bit like smuggling bibles into
a communist regime. But there was no need to make herself conspicuous just when
she was about to do a bit of undercover work, if you could call taking a jar of
ginger marmalade to an old lady that. You never read about Philip Marlowe carrying
ginger marmalade. Oh, well, down these shining corridors a woman must walk....
she found out the afternoon visiting times and left.

Hassan and Sally were
interviewing Mrs Marie Browning, cleaner to Mr Robert Kingston, deceased.

‘Very good of you to come back early from your
holiday, Mrs Browning.’ Hassan was in full genial mode.

‘No probs.’ Marie blew her nose.

Paul Lozinski had spoken to her on the mobile number
he found in Kingston’s address book (which was boringly unhelpful, plumbers,
electricians, lawn mowing service and so on but Kev was plodding his way
through them all) to break the news. Marie was thin, energetic, with bright orange-dyed
hair held back by blue plastic slides, wearing skinny jeans and a floral smock
top. She’d been staying at her son’s so hadn’t been too far away. However,
leaving aside fiendishly clever use of railway timetables, stolen bicycles or
disguises beloved of golden age thriller writers, it seemed likely that she
really had been with her son and his partner near the Scottish border, and had
in fact been with them in a lock-in at the village pub on the night in
question, and was therefore more likely to be informant than suspect. Paul had
been told to check it all out however, just to dot all the t’s and cross all
the i’s, as Golden Boy would say. Marie was a very hyper woman, her cleaning
must have been turbocharged, and she was someone who specialised in emotional
multi-tasking. She seemed upset, and angry, and pleased by the drama and
attention, all at the same time. She sipped the coffee Sally had given her, and
blew her nose again using the box of tissues placed at her elbow.

‘You turn your back for five minutes...’ She
looked at the plate of biscuits with initial interest which waned when she
clocked how inferior they were. ‘Poor Robert!’

‘So you’d been with Mr Kingston, er Robert, a long
time?’ Sally pushed the tissues nearer as if to make up for the biscuits.

‘Seven years. I cleaned for him, and for his mum
too till her house was sold. Easy enough, she lived next door! Lovely woman,
lovely, but particular.’

‘Ah yes we understand she died recently?’

‘Bout year and a half ago pet. Oh Robert was a
good son mind! D’you know he bought that house for his mum? He couldn’t do
enough for her!’

‘So he’d have made money on the house? His mother’s
I mean. All those houses along by the Golf Club are worth a fair bit.’

‘Oh yes. Well he was a surgeon of course, he
earned a hefty wage. Deserved it too! Whoever did this should be strung up by
their balls with barbed wire!’

Hassan winced reflexively at this image. Change
the subject. ‘So your holiday was arranged well in advance?’

She nodded.

‘For the recording, please Marie.’

‘Yes it was. I usually do three times a week. But
with going away, I gave the whole place a good bottoming, it must’ve been the morning
before... his last day.’ She blew her nose again and finished her coffee. ‘That
coffee’s shite. So at least he got to die in a clean house.’

‘Er yes. So you cleaned his private consulting
room?’

‘I did. I could have been doing it all along, but
well her ladyship had to do
that
room. Until she naffed off, then all of
a sudden it was my job.’

‘Her ladyship, would that be Tessa Kingston,
Marie?’ Sally could feel a galeforce bitch attack coming. ‘The wife who left
him?’

‘S’right. Dead common she is. Did well to bag
Robert. He was way out of her league. But you know what men are pet, think with
their dicks if at all.’ Sally daren’t look at the DS.

He tried not to defend his gender but to keep on
this promising tack. ‘So you didn’t like Tessa?’

‘Never did me any harm. Just, nowt much to her.
Pretty nurse who married the surgeon. Like a Mills and Boon. She was about as
much use as a chocolate erm, what’s the word?’

‘Fireguard?’

‘Teapot?’

‘Condom! She just flitted about getting her hair
and nails done 24/7. Speaking of chocolate, you could get some chocolate
hobnobs in you know. They’re bogof at Asda just now. These things are false
economy. Anyway, Tessa cleaned his consulting room herself, he supposedly
insisted on it, not that she’d exactly have worn herself out. Had to be
surgically clean. Well what do nurses know about that these days, what with MRSA
and flesh eating bugs all over the hospitals? And if you want my opinion, she
drinks. Broke her arm once falling downstairs, I ask you. And he was that nice
to her. Well, it’s the good that get taken. Poor Robert.’

‘So what happened when Tessa left?’

‘Oh well I had to clean that room as well didn’t
I? She was just, not there any more when I went along one day. He didn’t want
to talk about it, too upset I s’pose. But she was most likely bored, no
interests but herself and her appearance, no job, no bairns, and he worked
really hard operating on folk so she had too much time to herself, nice for
some. Caffeteer. That’s what you want in here, proper coffee. So you’d better
catch the bastard that did this. Barbed wire, balls!’