‘A red herring?’ she had said then, with something not unlike one on the end of her fork.
‘All right, suppose we say there is a connection. Suppose we forget motive because we don’t know what that is. Takahashi remains the main suspect for the first murder. He can’t have committed the second because he was sitting all Friday afternoon with twenty-four other people, listening to the closing session of the seminar. Oh and by the way, your idea about the films hasn’t helped. It was smart of you, though, to think that she would have taken more pictures, her being a photographer. But we’ve checked the places that do developing and Photo-Kwik doesn’t keep records by name, only numbers. So unless films are paid for by cheque or card there’s no record of names. Boots does it by name, though. There was a Takahashi.’ Sara’s face had brightened. ‘But not ours. Another Takahashi, a student. We’ve seen him. No connection. Nice idea, though.’
When Sara had looked rather crestfallen Andrew had simply shaken his head. ‘We just have to plough on. I still have my doubts that we’re looking at motiveless murders, but that’s the line that Askew’s taking on the Jones enquiry. That’s why he wants to bring in Leech for questioning, only I gather he’s gone AWOL. He hasn’t been seen since Thursday. The Golightlys say he may have been upset because they told him he couldn’t stay on beyond the summer. We’ll track him down in one of his haunts, he hasn’t the wit to go missing. But please, don’t go down to the towpath again, and certainly not at night.’
At seven o’clock in the morning Andrew closed the
hut, made his way down through the garden and returned to bed where he woke Sara up accidentally on purpose, by sliding one ice-cold foot against her leg. To stop him shivering, she turned, still half-asleep, wrapped her arms and legs around him and held him, without speaking, until he moved gently against her and into her, nudging his way slowly, without energy and almost sadly until he climaxed with a sigh and a tightening little shudder of his limbs. It was after nine when they woke again, still wrapped together, Sara with a crick in her shoulder, Andrew with a dead arm.
‘Oh
Christ,’
she said, furious and tearful. ‘Oh Christ, my shoulder! How the hell am I going to play like this? How can I play Dvořák like this! I must get a massage. I’ll have to get a later flight. I’ll need some physio. I’m supposed to be playing the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and you’ve mucked up my shoulder! You’re an
idiot
—it’s all your fault. Why did you
do
that!’
‘Well, excuse me. But you did
rather
do it, too, I seem to remember,’ Andrew snarled. ‘And now I’ll be late for seeing the kids. I don’t suppose you noticed
that
, did you?’ Was he ever going to be allowed to forget how important her bloody career was? What about his? What about his children?
‘I was half-asleep!’
‘Were you? I didn’t notice the difference,’ he said bitterly, slamming the door of the shower.
‘That’s an unforgivable thing to say!’ she shouted. It was and he knew it, but Andrew said more unforgivable things as he pulled on his clothes without bothering to dry himself. The last of them was that he had had enough. Sara screamed that so had she and he could get himself and his
bloody things out of her house. At that point Andrew dropped his voice to a civilised, hate-filled drawl and said that he would collect them when she was back from Salzburg at a time that did not inconvenience her, and Sara knew that he meant it. Fine, she replied in a voice just like his, so that he would know she meant it too.
After he had left Sara worked rather sheepishly in the music room, trying to ignore the feeling that his absence left behind. Here she was, the first day after the end of her relationship with Andrew, alone again in the house that had become exactly what it was after Matteo had died: a private, comfortable, beautiful mausoleum that she was screaming to be let out of. So, instead of sticking for as long as she should have done to the Dvořák, she decided that she did have time after all to go again to the Sulis to see James. The thought of Stephen Golightly had nothing whatever to do with it.
* * *
A
T ROUGHLY
the same moment Stephen Golightly was thinking about publicity and in particular how to avoid it. He had taken a nonchalant jog down to the main gate and satisfied himself that the police presence at the clinic entrance was as discreet as possible, reminding the officer to remain out of sight under the porch of the tiny lodge until any car should present itself. He then jogged as loosely as he could, in order to persuade the policeman of his unaltered calm, back up the drive. Stephen followed the curve as it rose around the knot garden on the south side to the almost empty car park. From there he climbed the terraced shrubbery and sat down on a recliner under the gazebo, breathing a fraction harder. As he checked his
pulse, mentally giving his cardiovascular fitness a big tick, he surveyed the city stretching out beyond the garden, so apparently still yet seething, he was sure, with thousands of potentially grateful patients. He smiled involuntarily, already hearing accolades, hardly noticing that the imagined conversations were in fact rehearsals for real compliments that he would engineer later.
August could be rather a depressing month, with few patients and those there were being mainly converts and regulars whose adulation no longer carried much thrill for him. He was a good doctor. He knew that by the brisk turnover he did down in town at his NHS practice, providing relief for the unvarying complaints of infancy, maturity and old age. But these patients came and went as if both his prescriptions (which they took) and his advice (which they ignored) in some way disappointed; as if he were ministering to them inadequately and sending them away with rather less than they felt was their due. He sometimes wondered if they held him somehow to blame for their being ill in the first place, as if they thought that it was in his power to exempt, say, a two-year-old from glue ear, a teenager from acne, a septuagenarian from arthritis. When he saw, by contrast, the quite preposterous gratitude in the eyes of his Sulis patients, he was able then to see himself as they did. Then he also
felt
that he was good, as well as knowing that he was.
This August had looked no different from half a dozen others, to begin with. It had been no surprise to take Bunny Fernandez’s booking, nor to see Dafydd Broadbent again, and there was always a patient or two of Warwick’s type about the place. But James and Joyce, both ideal patients from the treatability point of view, as
well as Jane Valentine in the kind of emotional postdivorce collapse that was usually responsive to lots of sympathetic attention, had been unlooked-for bonuses. So this August should have been gratifying both to his own self-esteem and to the effect on autumn bookings that could be expected when the walking adverts themselves, a new quotient of fit ex-patients, went home and expressed their conversion to naturopathy to their amazed relatives and friends.
So it was not the murder that was the worst of it in Stephen’s view, bad as it was. The proper response, which he had been careful to give, to the death of Warwick was to agree that it was appalling, but his private calculation was that while the murder was regrettable, it was also forgettable. Warwick had not been a regular patient and had put ‘None’ after next-of-kin on his form. The nephews had been unearthed by the police in Solihull or somewhere, he believed, not a region that supplied a flow of Sulis patients in any case, so any word-of-mouth damage to the clinic would be minimal.
But now there was Bunny Fernandez, too. Until Warwick (and he hardly counted in that way) Stephen had never before had a death at the Sulis. It wasn’t what people came for. He had decided, immediately after Bunny had been found in a state of mouthing semi-consciousness, to go for containment. The circumstance of her having been seen by the Open Day guests, a good half-dozen prospective patients, was unfortunate, but he could do no more about it. It was just possible that enough had been said subsequently to allay any fear that Bunny was in any way illustrative of what happened to you if you went to the Sulis, but he did not hold out much hope of a flood of
bookings arising from the Open Day. Again unfortunate, but not disastrous.
And he had squared things pretty well with the family. Seeing at once that Bunny was unlikely to recover he had persuaded the son-in-law that she really should not be moved to hospital to undergo ‘invasive, high-tech resuscitation procedures which would at best delay the inevitable for a few more painful days’. And the daughter had not needed persuading for she had lapsed into a kind of airy optimism, taking shelter behind his advice, or rather her own self-deluding interpretation of it, that if Bunny should stay at the clinic then her ‘little turn’ could surely only be something trivial. So luckily the worst possible eventuality—a patient being rushed more dead than alive into the Royal United from that posh Sulis place—had been avoided, and consequently no damaging gossip was currently buzzing around the entire city of Bath and its surrounding counties.
Nonetheless, once he had been able to get through to the daughter that her mother really had died it had offended him disproportionately, even as he was writing ‘cerebrovascular accident’ on the death certificate, that the old lady should have slipped away when in his careful hands. She had been loyal and rewarding to treat. That he had proved unworthy of her faith and ultimately undeserving of her gratitude swept through him as a kind of guilty sadness. He pulled the small bottle marked ‘Gaia—energising compound of organic carrot and orange juices with extract of betel’ from the front pocket of his track-suit top and drank deeply from it. Clear liquid reassurance swam down his body. You are a good doctor, he breathed to himself.
And yet, he considered, casting watchful eyes across the empty garden and drinking swiftly from the bottle again, not even Bunny’s strokes and subsequent death, which had been, as he had memorised for his own comfort, a peaceful end after more than eighty active years, were the worst part of this August. The worst of this most depressing of Augusts was the intractable nature of the other patients’ complaints.
He tried to brighten the picture for himself by thinking about Joyce Cruikshank who, despite having the most sceptical attitude of anyone in the establishment, had been improving steadily. She had gained weight and condition, and even if she was not a specimen of glossy good health, she looked much less brittle. Her attitude may have softened, too, though it hardly mattered. She still took her meals in her room, preferring the company of her dog to that of the other staff and patients, but her admittedly undemanding work seemed to find favour with those who went to her sessions. He was no musician himself, but the jangles and twangs and hoots that reached him from the music room sounded jolly enough.
But Dafydd Broadbent had come to the end of his stay and gone back to Llandeillo with twitching hands, a clear sign, they had decided between them, of the body’s ability to heal itself. Stephen, taking care not to call them convulsions, had said that the twitches must be the effects of deep muscle tissue realignment following trauma—Dafydd had had a nasty whiplash and wrist sprain last March following a prang on the A38—but, facing facts quietly to himself in the privacy of his garden, Stephen acknowledged that he had been relieved to see him go, for Dafydd had exhausted all the therapeutic possibilities in
his pharmacopoeia and shown no real improvement. And Dafydd’s increasingly vivid nightmares, which had woken him screaming on several nights in a row, were potentially unsettling for other patients. Thank God for thick walls.
And he hadn’t liked the look of Jane Valentine this morning. The lassitude that she had displayed on arrival had deepened into profound exhaustion, though her appetite was still good, if sporadic. The alternating freezing, burning and numb sensations in the extremities might yet respond to massage and hot and cold spinal baths. He had known circulations lazier than hers though not, he conceded, in anyone as young as she was. Her intolerance of being covered even by the lightest of blankets was a tad hysterical and, in Yvonne’s view, mainly for his benefit. She could be right about that. Mrs Valentine would not be the first female patient keen to make sure that he saw how pretty her breasts looked under a silk nightdress, and she might be just at that stage following divorce when a forbidden, avenging affair on her own terms might appeal to her. Not that she would be up to much, physically, for the moment. Stephen smiled. There was no reason why he should not enjoy being regarded as quarry, but there was forbidden and forbidden and he drew the line at affairs with patients.
But not necessarily at patients’ friends, he pondered, watching unseen from his vantage point the progress of Sara Selkirk’s car up the drive, yet a mere affair, avenging, half-forbidden or otherwise was not what one could contemplate with a woman like that. Sara Selkirk was the sort of woman with whom there could be no paddling about in the shallows but only the deepest, headlong plunge into dark water. He could tell that ‘casual’ would simply not be
in her vocabulary, which made her the most intoxicating and also the most dangerous of prospects. There was the policeman, of course, Andrew Poole. Stephen contemplated how much of an obstacle he might turn out to be. Her being attracted to him physically was easy enough to understand and the fellow was certainly no fool, but it was impossible to judge how strong the bond between them was. He found that this only added to the enjoyable sense of danger surrounding Sara. Perhaps his hope that they were not truly close arose more from his own need than from anything he had detected between them. Yet there was nothing remotely coquettish about her, so Stephen could not believe that he mistook altogether, when Sara looked at him, the merest shadow in her eyes that conveyed that she might not necessarily be completely committed elsewhere.
He watched her move into the building, thinking how good a red dress looks on a dark-haired woman, and feeling also neatly unavailable to answer her worried questions. He would not have to explain that James was much as before and see the disappointment in her eyes. James was, if anything, slightly worse, he reminded himself, slipping fretfully back into his original line of thought. Patients with major rebalancing to accomplish before the body’s own healing power prevailed often did get worse before they got better. It was a salutary reminder, Stephen thought, of the devastating effects that shock and stress can have on a body, because it was since Warwick’s and Bunny’s deaths that James had relapsed. Sometimes, he justified, the body needed a dose of the most effective natural relaxant known to man, and it was a pity that someone had not tipped a large brandy down James’s throat on
Friday. After another careful look round he unscrewed the top off the juice bottle and drained the last of the vodka. It wasn’t as if it was a habit with him, after all, but it would not play well with either his loyal staff or adoring patients if they learned that from time to time he allowed himself to break his own rules. He was human, and it was not his fault, he thought peevishly, if people sometimes forgot that.