Dying to Know (2 page)

‘That was in the forties. Things are a lot better now.'

‘No.'

I knew that tone well and gave up the argument. ‘Are you still bunged up?'

‘Something chronic.'

‘The linctus didn't work?'

She shook her head. She had a broad South London accent smeared over with pretension. ‘Hardly any movement at all.'

‘Oh, dear.' I had to think what to do next. Man's ingenuity, it seemed, had met its match in Jessie Trout; I was running out of laxatives; but then, I reasoned, there probably wasn't a lot of research done on improving bowel movements.

‘And it got worse with all the kerfuffle.'

‘Did it?' I asked this not really listening to what either of us was saying. I had picked up my copy of the
British National Formulary
– the prescriber's bible – and was once more going through the section on substances designed to shift recalcitrant bowels; it was distressingly well thumbed.

‘Fancy! Two people shot two doors away from me!'

I looked up at her. ‘Shot?' Jessie lived in Greyhound Lane which wasn't quite the height of sophisticated living, but it wasn't Dodge City either.

‘Yes. Didn't you hear about it?' She was incredulous that I was in ignorance. I shook my head which was her cue to take the podium and proclaim; I had cheered her up no end and for the moment her constipation and her haemorrhoids were forgotten.

‘It happened at Mr Baines' house. Of course, he said he was a taxi driver, but I always thought that there was something a bit shady about him . . .'

‘And he got shot?'

‘Yes. In the middle of the night! It woke me up and I poked Norman in the side and asked him if he'd heard it.'

‘Had he?'

‘No, of course not. He wears ear plugs and a blindfold, so he won't even hear the crack of doom when it opens up.'

Mr Trout struck me as perhaps a wise man. ‘Who else was shot?'

‘Apparently it was Mr Baines' partner! Eddie Perry.'

This was in the innocent, halcyon days of the middle 1970s when a male partner of a man automatically meant business partner and nothing else.

‘Who did it?'

She made a face because I was being stupid. ‘They did it to each other!' She paused. ‘At least, that's what the police say.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, apparently they'd been in prison for armed robbery! They only got out a few weeks ago, which was when Mr Baines moved in. To think!'

Feeling somewhat battered by the constant stream of exclamation marks coming in my direction, I began to see that I had been labouring under a misapprehension regarding the relationship of the two victims. ‘But why did they shoot each other?'

‘It was all over jewellery, they say. Apparently they robbed a jeweller's in London. Terrible it was, because someone got killed, but then they got caught and put in prison; no one ever found the jewellery, though. It's said that only Mr Baines knew where it was, but when it came to time to split the loot, they had a falling out. Presumably Mr Baines didn't want to part with it.'

Split the loot
. I wondered if Mickey Spillane featured prominently on her bookshelves.

‘What's happened to the jewellery?'

She became excited and, accordingly, out came a fresh stock of punctuation marks. ‘Nobody knows! The police are baffled!'

She could have got a job writing headlines.

‘And you think that this has exacerbated your constipation?'

She was slightly nonplussed, I think, by my terminology, but she nodded anyway. I turned back to the BNF and discovered a new preparation that combined Ex-lax and castor oil. If that didn't shift her, then I was going to have to resort either to witchcraft or to mechanical means.

TWO

I
t was cold and foggy, the dampness soaking deep into my bones, despite the heavy parka that I wore. I had wisely put on wellington boots, but even with thick socks I had serious concerns that frostbite might claim my toes for good. One of my patients – a cheerful colonel with a thin, greying moustache and eyes that were faded by decades of bright foreign sun – had lost three toes and two fingers to frostbite following a botched parachute drop in Norway during World War Two, and he had repeatedly told me in great and unnecessary detail how much it had hurt and for how long. I didn't fancy that, not for a few fireworks, a burnt sausage in a soggy roll and a liquid that might have been coffee, but might easily have been the water used to wash out the percolator.

Max, though, was enjoying it.

I loved Max madly. She was brilliantly, enthusiastically,
alive
, and contagious too. She seemed to lighten the mood wherever she went, in whomever she met. Now, staring up into the darkness, she was carrying around a smile wide enough to threaten her ears, and that ought to have made her look something like an imbecile, but it didn't. It made her strangely, impossibly beautiful; I think that this was because she was not only physically attractive, but spiritually, too. She was small in a nice way, somehow built with perfect economy, and with just the right number of imperfections to make her human: her eyes were slightly too widely spaced, her mouth ever-so-slightly lopsided; individual components that somehow summed to a whole that made me want to be with her. She was intelligent, too – a vet having recently joined a practice in Norbury, had graduated top of her year from Bristol and already had a not unimpressive list of research papers to her name. Yet the evening's trip to the fireworks display had left her excited beyond words, filled with childlike glee that made me dissolve inside.

And she was, incredibly, besotted with me.

We were in Lloyd Park in South Croydon, watching the municipal fireworks display, a huge bonfire casting not only a flickering glow but also a distinct heat to the right side of my face; it only made the chill in my feet seem more intense. Max wore pink woolly gloves and bobble hat with matching scarf over a chocolate-brown overcoat; her cheeks were cerise, her eyes bright. The smell of autumn – decaying leaves, smoke and fog – was in my nose and throat, the murmur of the crowd around us. It was difficult to judge how many people were there, but I would have said at least five hundred, perhaps a thousand. I had already spotted three of my patients, and Max had been accosted once by a little woman with tiny screwed-up eyes and strange jerky movements – she kept reaching out and touching Max's coat as she talked. Max explained later that her dog had just had a tumour removed from its spine. Not that Max had been the vet that had done it or even that the two of them knew each other; it was just that they had got talking. That was something else about Max; she attracted odd people, seeming to radiate something that allowed them to home in on her.

The final fusillade of rockets boomed across the park, causing Max to scream again, her gloved hands clamped over her ears, her face suffused with a delight that was lit by the silvers, golds, pinks, blues and greens of the star-bursts above our heads. The echoes had not completely died away as the conversation of the crowd began to pick up as it dispersed slowly by breaking up into small groups that turned to make their way to their cars or the bus stops.

‘Is it over?'

Max still had her hands to her ears, so I nodded as I said as loudly as social convention would allow, ‘For this year.'

Her hands dropped, but her attitude suggested that she did not really believe me, that I might be tricking her into exposing her delicate tympanic membranes to unaccustomed violence, thus causing deafness or even worse. Having reassured herself of my truthfulness, she relaxed, then sighed. ‘That was so much fun.'

‘Wonderful,' I agreed as enthusiastically as the agony in my pedal extremities would allow.

She reached across to me and grabbed my arm, snuggling up to me in a most delightful manner, as she asked, ‘What are we going to do now?'

We were already nearly alone, the fire now burning low, the ground around us trampled and muddy. It suddenly seemed a desolate, even dangerous, place; certainly one to escape from. ‘How about a Wimpy?'

‘Let's!'

Another of Max's endearing traits was that she loved Wimpy hamburgers. We began to trudge back towards the civilization that was Coombe Road where I had parked my car, each step bringing yet more pain to my feet. We held hands and she looked about her with an expression of contentment. ‘I'd like to move here.' At present she lived quite close to me, on the northern side of Thornton Heath.

‘It's quite expensive.'

She looked at me archly. ‘Too expensive for me?'

‘I didn't say that.' Her father was a consultant surgeon, her mother a psychiatrist; I hadn't met them yet and was terrified that when I did I would be thoroughly dissected, both body and soul.

‘I may be only a junior partner in the practice, but my prospects are good.'

I smiled. ‘Today caged rodents and small dogs, tomorrow farm animals? Perhaps in time you'll get the zoo gig.'

‘You swine,' she said fiercely, tightening her grip on my hand, but laughing nonetheless.

We had reached my car and I opened her door for her, then got in my side. The engine was cold and, as usual, the damp did not help; it took me several moments to coax the engine into action and even then I would have diagnosed it as suffering bronchiectasis. We moved off towards Croydon town centre somewhat jerkily as I said, ‘Anyway, what's wrong with Thornton Heath?'

She laughed. ‘What's right with it?'

I was hurt; I, for one, quite liked the place. ‘It's better than Croydon.'

Not that, on the face of it, there was much difference. Once Thornton Heath had been a small village in its own right; now it was merely a vague increase in the density of houses, shops and offices on the road from London to the south coast. I liked to think, though, that under the surface, the village atmosphere remained. There was still a definable community and people still had an allegiance to the place; you couldn't say that about Croydon. When I voiced this opinion, Max seemed to think that I was gibbering.

‘“Community”? “Village atmosphere”?' she enquired in what I could only describe as a tone bordering on incredulity. ‘I work there, don't forget. You're not talking to someone who's just flown in from the other side of the world.'

‘What's so special about Croydon, then?'

‘Well, the centre's got a bit of life, for a start,' she said as we turned right on to the Wellesley Road and the glories of downtown Croydon were spread out before us. ‘At least there's been a bit of development here in the past twenty years. It's not the land that time forgot.'

I said, ‘It's dead, soulless.'

‘Only this bit. A few streets away, and there are some really nice places.'

‘There are some really nice places around Thornton Heath.'

She thought about this. ‘I'm not sure that Twinkle would like it here.' Twinkle was her pet rabbit. A vicious man-eating thing that I suspected was in the early stages of rabies.

I swung around the large roundabout over the pass over, then took the third exit. The Wimpy was just on our left and I managed to park not too far away. We walked back and went in to find, not altogether to my surprise, that it was not bursting at the seams with clientele. I had been going in there for years and never once had I seen more than two or three tables occupied; moreover, there always seemed to be the same people in there. Inevitably there would be a group of four of five teenagers of varying ethnic backgrounds and genders, and an unkempt man of indeterminate age who had the look of madness in his rheumy eye. All of these would stare at me through clouds of cigarette smoke from the moment I entered the burger bar until the moment I left it; indeed, the unkempt man would keep staring at me through the glass of the shop front, presumably just in case I fooled him and doubled back in when he was least expecting it.

And behind the counter . . .

I had been in many burger bars, but none was quite like this. The concept of a welcoming atmosphere did not enter the manager's retail philosophy and, I suspect, would have sat uneasily with the majority of their clientele.

We ordered two cheeseburgers and fries, standing at the counter, trying to look as if we were used to our place in the limelight and didn't mind in the least that the place had fallen silent as soon as we entered; Max stayed up-close and personal, which I didn't mind in the least. The burgers were prepared before our very eyes, with not a word from either the chef or the pinch-faced woman who served us. This was presumably company policy, because I had only ever heard her utter two things – ‘Yes' when you went in and the price when the repast was presented and she wanted payment.

As soon as we were on the pavement, we both burst into a fit of giggles, clutching our supper, despite the fact that the unkempt man sustained his remorseless vigilance through the slightly steamed window.

‘Where shall we go to eat it?' asked Max.

I hesitated a fraction of a second before saying, ‘We could just sit in the car, I suppose . . .'

‘We could . . .'

‘Or we could nip home and eat it in comfort . . .'

‘We could, indeed . . .'

We looked at one another, our faces bearing serious expressions that did not reach our eyes before we burst again into giggles. Without any further conversation, we hurried to the car, got in and I drove us home.

I don't know what Max was thinking, but my own thoughts were distinctly libidinous and not for family viewing.

Max was my first serious attachment since the business with the murder on the allotments back in the summer. She was a complete contrast to Charlie, my previous girlfriend, and this was a constant source of wonder to me; how could I have felt so attracted to two so different people? Yet I was.