Second Opinion (51 page)

At five minutes to four the board again clattered with a new message about the flight from Bucharest. Four-fifteen, it announced, was the expected time of arrival now, and at this she stamped her cold feet both in anger and in an attempt to warm them a little, and this time her bladder shrieked urgently at the jolt and informed her that there was no way it was prepared to hold on that long.

She used every control trick in the book; tightened her pelvic floor muscles, straightened her back and lifted her shoulders so as to enlarge her abdominal space and give her bladder more room, bit her tongue and thought of music, the best distraction she knew of, and the urgency began to ease; and then someone at the back of the waiting crowd began to whistle and the shrill sound pierced the air and moved straight into her belly. Again her bladder tightened and now she knew she hadn’t a hope of holding on any longer.

‘Please,’ she said to the woman beside her in the crush, also leaning on the barrier. ‘I must go to the ladies room, but if I go away and my friend comes and doesn’t see me she’ll be so upset. Will you hold my place till I come back? I’d be very grateful.’

The woman looked at her wide eyed and startled. ‘Pliss?’ she said.

‘Oh, God,’ George said and asked the man on her other side. He looked over his shoulder and nodded so she flashed a smile at him and began to push her way out of the crowd. It was easier to control the urge now she was moving and once she was out of the thickest press of people
she could run, and run she did, scanning the multitude of signs for the nearest women’s lavatory.

She located it at last and shot in and found two women waiting and the available doors all showing the red engaged flash.

‘Oh, God,’ she said again. ‘I’m about to burst. May I go in front of the line?’ The waiting women looked at her, one with a glower and the other with a sympathetic nod.

‘Of course,’ the kindly one said just as a door opened, and George gasped her thanks and shot in.

The relief was huge and she sat there with her head down, letting the freedom from pressure roll over her as she caught her breath, for her rush had been a considerable effort. Her pulses slowed at last and she felt ready to stand up and fix her clothes and hurry back to the crowded barrier to wait for the plane from Bucharest.

The other stalls had emptied and been used a couple of times while she’d been there, and as she zipped her trousers and pulled her jacket straight, she became aware of voices coming from further down the line of cubicles. An adult with a child, she thought vaguely, and then stood very still.

There were two voices coming from one stall. They were speaking softly but she could hear them. She was on a line with them and the doors closed off some of the racket from outside, while letting it travel laterally since the inner walls, unlike the doors, ended a couple of feet from the ceiling. She couldn’t identify words, but that there was an intense and hurried colloquy going on was beyond doubt.

And neither of the voices was that of a child.

She shot out of the cubicle she was in and over to the wash basin and began to run the water. The mirror in front of her reflected all that was going on behind her and she watched covertly but closely from beneath her lashes as she washed. It didn’t seem possible that the person for whom she’d been waiting and watching had somehow eluded her, come on a different flight, walked past her, only to be here
now, and yet she was convinced that was what had happened. Those two voices had been too expressive, too tight, too low and too conspiratorial for her to doubt it.

Other women around her washed and dried their hands under the hot-air dryers and prinked with lipstick and powder puffs as she stood there, and still one of the cubicle doors remained closed. The conviction grew in her that there was a deep significance here — yet at the same time she was very aware of the clock creeping on and the need to get back to the crowded barrier in time to watch the arrival of the passengers from Bucharest if she was wrong about what was happening here.

She had washed enough to perform an operation, had dried her hands till they were red with the heat, had primped and tweaked at her hair until she felt like a photographer’s model or something before the cubicle door at last opened.

It did not open far; someone slipped out, and George stared through the mirror, fascinated. The person who emerged was a short round girl, quite young but far from youthfully dressed. Her hair was tied up in a scarf and her feet were in heavy boots. George had to crane to see them but the girl stood still for a moment at the door of the lavatory which had now closed again, ostensibly fastening her jacket, a thick one, quilted and lumpy. She had her head down so that her face could not be seen but George had the impression not of roundness like her body but of angularity. The legs in the heavy trousers beneath the thick jacket couldn’t be seen; the trousers were ill cut and baggy and showed no sign of the flesh beneath them.

The girl moved away then and headed slowly for the door, and George stood poised, uncertain what to do next. She was as sure as she could be that she was looking at the courier; the clothes, the style, everything about her was as she had imagined the courier would be. The fact that she had clearly not come off the Bucharest flight was beside the
point; there had to be other ways of getting into London from Romania than the obvious one, surely?

But if I go after her, then whoever she has left behind in that cubicle will get away, she thought, feverishly pulling at her hair without realizing she was doing it, still trying to pretend she was preening and not watching the woman who had now finished buttoning her coat.

The woman lifted her chin and George managed some how to shift her eyeline so that she was not obviously staring at her, but then couldn’t help it. George’s eyes flicked back till she was looking at her, and her pulse began to pump thickly in her ears. The girl was staring at her, scared and wide eyed, and her face was exactly as George had suspected it would be; thin, bony and far from well covered. There was no way that a girl with a face like that was as bulky as her clothes would make a casual looker suspect. Without stopping to think further George whirled and began to move towards her.

It all happened very quickly then. As the girl saw George coming she moved sideways, quite clearly intending to run, but as she did so a woman with four small children in tow came fussing into the lavatory from outside, talking loudly at one of the children who was dragging on her hand and bawling at the top of her voice. The girl in the bulky clothes had to dodge to avoid them, and as she did so, the door of the cubicle she had come from opened again and a woman came out. She was wearing a sensible navy blue coat and a round hat pushed down on to her head so firmly no hair could be seen. Her face was pale and she wore no make-up. She looked vaguely uniformed, and the impression was increased by the sensible bag she had depending from a shoulder strap on her right side and the big oblong carrier bag she was holding in her left hand. George looked at the girl, then at the hatted woman and decided. She made a lunge for the latter, and in that moment the girl in the quilted jacket made her escape, pushing past the woman
with the collection of four children, all of whom immediately started wailing loudly as the escaper knocked against them.

But it had been enough for George. She had the woman in the hat and the almost-uniform by the arm and was pulling on it, holding on for grim death.

‘Sister!’ she said loudly. ‘Sister Collinson! Not the person I expected to see at all! May I look in your bag, please?’

37
  
  

‘I don’t think,’ Gus said, ‘I’ve ever seen anything funnier.’

‘If it had been you, you’d be laughing out of the other end of your anatomy,’ George said, wincing as she moved her right arm. It still ached abominably where the older of the four children had bitten her. She hadn’t broken the skin but had made a massive bruise. ‘That child had jaws like a Rottweiler.’

‘Yeah, pity about that. Still, if it hadn’t been for them …’

‘If it hadn’t been for
me
your lot would have lost her this time altogether,’ George said. ‘Never mind those godawful kids.’

‘We’d have got her eventually,’ Gus said. ‘They’ve got three more of her couriers since then.’ He smiled then, a little grimly. ‘They were very surprised young women when it was one of my PCs they met in the loo.’

‘Yeah, well,’ George said. ‘Maybe. The thing is, I —’

He leaned forward and touched her bruised arm gently. ‘It’s all right, George. I know it was you who broke this case. So will everyone else. That’s a promise.’

‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘You make me sound —’ She stopped.

‘Competitive? You bet your sweet whatever-it-is.’ He laughed. ‘But that’s the way I am, too. If I’d had the good luck to be in the right place at the right moment the way you were, I’d be pretty damned pleased with myself too.’

‘It wasn’t
just
luck,’ she said. ‘I mean, I had thought about it.’

‘Who are you kidding, sweetheart? You was waiting for the Bucharest flight, the same as we were. Rupert told me you were there as soon as I turned up, and I saw you for myself! But I thought, who am I to spoil her fun? But then you vanished.’

‘I was bursting. I had to go.’

‘I know the feeling.’ He was richly sympathetic. ‘And it’s never the right time. Only for you, it was.’

‘I have to admit it was one hell of a coincidence. I’m there for that plane, trying to convince myself the courier’ll be on it. And when it comes to the point I have to find a loo, and it turns out to be the loo where the courier is! I ask you! It’s stretching credulity a bit.’

‘Not that much. In real life coincidences like that happen all the time. Read Arthur Koestler if you don’t believe me. It’s called synchronicity.’

‘It is?’ She searched her memory for Arthur Koestler and couldn’t find him there.

‘Believe me, you have to trust Nature and this sort of thing is a natural phenomenon.’ He laughed again, a deep burr of satisfaction. ‘If you hadn’t had a call of Nature you’d have missed her. Let’s hear it for Nature.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose so.’ She stretched. ‘Anyway, I was right, wasn’t I?’

‘What about? Julia Arundel? Poor Dr Arundel who is as pure as the driven whatsit and can’t believe what’s been going on behind her back?’

George had the grace to blush a little. ‘Well, fair enough, I was wrong there, just like Susan Kydd was a good guess, even if that was wrong too. No, I mean about how it was done.’

‘Yeah.’ He went over to the table in the corner to fetch more coffee, and waved through the glass at one of the policemen outside to fetch more when he found it empty. ‘You got that right. Well done.’

She preened. ‘I’m really pleased about that. It was such a sudden realization.’

‘Mind you, it was my nice old lady who got it,’ he said as the coffee arrived, brought by Michael Urquhart. ‘Ta, Mike. Shut the door on the other side, will you? Yeah. It was all Vanny’s doing.’

‘Aren’t I to have any credit?’ she said a little plaintively. ‘I mean, who caught Collinson?’

‘Your bladder did,’ he said promptly, and she made a face at him.

They sat and sipped coffee in silence for a while and then she put her cup down with a little clatter. ‘What happens now?’

‘We’ve got Collinson’s statement to work on. It wasn’t hard to get it all out of her. I really think she thought she’d never be caught. She had no plan ready for what she might say if she was, not a hint of an alibi or anything like it. And we got a warrant to check her flat and it’s all there, anyway. She kept meticulous records, you know. Very tidy. How Harry Rajabani ever got hold of that stuff from her, I’ll never know.’

‘Did she ever do any of the bookwork involved in her scheme at the hospital?’ George asked.

‘Oh, sure. She had to. She told me she just went into the Fertility Unit office whenever she had to leave the Paediatric ward and go over to Maternity to see a baby there outside Cherry’s normal office hours, and just helped herself to the names and addresses of people she found there. Then all she had to do was contact them and she had her customers all ready and set.’

‘Um,’ George said. ‘Yes, that was the lot we found, wasn’t it? Just part of some names she collected from the Fertility office and then typed up in code on Matty’s typewriter.’

‘Yup.’

‘I have to admit something,’ George said, not sure why she had to tell him this, but feeling she ought for Cherry’s
sake. ‘I wouldn’t let Cherry help me decode that list. If I had she’d have seen at once it was a list of her patients — some of them — complete with physical descriptions to make sure of good matches between babies and adopters. She knows all of them, doesn’t she? But I thought …’ She shrugged. ‘Silly, I know, but it was police business so I kept her out of it.’

He roared with laughter. ‘It’s OK for you,
verboten
for her? You really are a right little madam sometimes, George! Oh, don’t look at me like that! You were right to be careful, it just struck me as funny.’

‘I thought it would,’ George said sourly.