Second Opinion (52 page)

‘You’re forgiven.’ He was very cheerful. ‘We got Collinson, and that’s what matters. She thinks she was doing a public service, you know. Doesn’t see any harm in what happened. Except for the babies she had to swap. She admits that was rough on the parents, but says it’s all right for them really. They can always have another baby. She’s got about as much — oh, I don’t know — understanding of what it’s like to be a woman as — as a fly. How she ever worked as a nurse I’ll never know.’

‘I should have realized,’ George said. ‘I spotted quite early on that she couldn’t care less about the job. Not only was she racist — very nasty about Dr Choopani — she just did the paperwork, stayed at her desk, never did anything with the children unless she had to. Not like Goss, dammit. He might be a fascist pig but he was ten times the caring person she was. Odd, isn’t it?’

‘Odd? It’s crazy!’ he said. ‘Goss reckons to go on with his career, you know. And there’s not a lot against him doing it. We can get him on offences under the Race Relations Act, but as I understand it that needn’t damage his chances of staying on the Nurses’ Register or whatever it is, or of working. Worries me, that.’

‘Worries you?’ she said feelingly. ‘How do you suppose hospital staff feel? We try to kid ourselves we’re all motivated
by the highest of principles and then we find out some of us are the same as everyone else. Greedy, selfish, downright wicked. Like Goss. Only his sort of wickedness he can get away with because of the way the world is, and the Collinson sort …’ She shook her head. ‘She did it just for money.’

‘It’s a hell of a just for,’ he said. ‘She told me she’s made over a million quid since she started. And I’m not even sure the court can take it away from her even if — or rather when — she’s found guilty and sent down. Her overheads were minimal — the price of air tickets for those girls who want to come here anyway — and they come from all sorts of places, not just Romania. The one who got away from you is a Hungarian, apparently. That’s why she came in earlier than we expected, on the Budapest flight. As I say, all Collinson had to do was pay their fares and give them a risible cash sum and then she got them jobs as au pairs with families willing to ask no questions in exchange for cheap domestic help. The girls liked it well enough — anywhere’s better than Eastern Europe, it seems — and the infertile got their illicit babies, and according to Collinson she’s done a public service.’

‘It’s a hell of a public service to kill a baby and a man,’ George said. ‘She makes me feel physically sick, you know that?’

‘You surprise me.’ He looked genuinely puzzled. ‘You cut up bodies and paddle around in guts in a way that makes most people feel really very peculiar indeed — I have to concentrate not to get myself in a state over your PMs — and yet faced with a bit of common-or-garden human greed and selfishness you get all queasy. Odd that.’

‘Not odd at all,’ she said passionately. ‘Bodies aren’t ugly and selfish and — human bodies are
beautiful
. Beautifully arranged, beautifully planned, magnificently organized. It’s minds that …’ She shivered a little. ‘I think I ought to take
an update course in forensic psychology. Maybe I’d feel better about all this then.’

‘That’s all I’m short of,’ he said. ‘Jesus! Imagine you going around analysing minds all over the place. It’d be hell.’

‘You reckon? I’ll have to do it then.’ There was a short silence and then she said, ‘How did she kill Harry? I mean which car?’

‘I’m embarrassed about that and can’t deny it. It was
her
car. It’s been sitting there in the hospital car park in the open all this time. I’ve given Roop hell over it. It never occurred to
me
it wouldn’t occur to
him
to look there, but he didn’t ever think there could be a connection with the hospital, would you believe. He can be bloody stupid sometimes — but that’s just between us. It wouldn’t do if it got out I’d been slagging him off to you.’

She was flattered. ‘You can trust me.’

‘I know that. Anyway, that’s how we missed checking her car. She used that to run him down, but after the weathering it’s had, the chances of there being any evidence left is slim. Not that it matters too much, thank Gawd. She talked willingly enough.’

‘How did she get him there? To the pub, I mean.’

Gus shook his head. ‘It was Harry himself who did it. He asked her to meet him there. He’d worked out that there was something going on, that some of the people who came into Paediatrics to see Patricia Collinson were not strictly kosher, and he wanted to get it out of her. He’d found the lists, is my guess — she’d typed them, of course, not him. He had broken the code though. So he wanted to talk to her. He chose the place. She dressed in that sort of anonymous stuff that made the landlord think she was a bloke — she wasn’t trying to fool anyone. Just wanted to look ordinary, she said — and then ran him over. It was a thing she did on the spur of the moment. No planning at all. He’d rattled her badly telling her he knew and she didn’t want to stop her
racket. She hit him with the jack from her car, which she keeps on her front seat in case of trouble — I ask you! — and was going to just leave him there. And then after she got in her car she just went for him. Poor bastard. Stupid bastard …’

‘And then she went back and parked the car and that was all?’ George was incredulous.

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘Good God!’

‘You can say that again. Bloody Roop. Not to have checked the hospital car park …’

‘How about the baby she killed?’ It seemed politic to change the subject, and George saw no point in nagging about the car. Anyway, it wouldn’t have made much difference if they had found it, after all; Collinson could quite easily have said she’d left it unlocked and available to any sneak thief. ‘She was very careless about that, wasn’t she? Leaving the plastic bag over the head. If she hadn’t, it could have seemed a cot death like the others, even though it was dumped the way it was.’

‘She’s been careless from the start. She never really thought anything through properly. She had arranged for the Hillmans to bring Teddy in to the Paediatric department so that she could have a look at him and sort out what was going on. But she didn’t make sure she was there to meet ‘em when they arrived. It would have been all right for her if she’d done that. They never met her, only talked on the phone. So she’d have been safe enough. But when they arrived she wasn’t waiting for them at the door as she should have been — she says that herself now — and Prudence Jennings was on duty and took one look at the child and scooped him up. Collinson wouldn’t have let a doctor near him if she’d planned it right. She’d have admitted him, killed him quietly — another cot death, it’d have seemed — and that would have been that. She’d have got the Hillmans another baby, she said. As though they were like — like
fridges or freezers, things you can swap if the first one isn’t up to quality.’ He grimaced. ‘It is sickening, at that.’

‘I’m glad you agree.’ George was a little sardonic. ‘Because a woman who can kill a baby and leave the plastic bag over its head when she dumps it has to be some nasty piece of work.’

‘Yeah, I agree. But for once she did think. Sort of. She left the bag because she said she didn’t want to take any chances of any infected material reaching her from its mouth and nose, seeing the child had AIDS. Would you believe it? But there you go, she’s all of a piece, I suppose. No surprises about her. Though there would have been, if it had been Julia Arundel, wouldn’t there? Agreed?’

George bit her lip. ‘I suppose so. No doctor who obviously cared as much about her patients as she did could have been quite so — Well, I was wrong, OK? No need to rub it in.’

‘Would I rub it in?’

‘Yup.’

‘Oh.’

There was another silence and then George said, ‘Has anyone told the Popodopoulos family or the Chowdarys yet?’

‘Not yet. We have to track down the babies. And then do something about the adopters. Poor devils are going to be in a terrible state.’ He stopped. ‘I wonder if it’d be OK for them to have the baby that came in yesterday with the courier? I gather Dr Kydd’s been looking after him, and he’s in reasonable shape. About a fortnight old, and not HIV positive as far as they can tell. The tests will be going on, I suppose. And if not him, there’ll be more coming in, I suspect. Interpol are doing what they can to stop the trade but they’re not likely to do it just like that. And I can’t see the authorities sending the babies back. So, offering them to the people Collinson cheated could help them. Poor sods’ll have had a bad time of it. If they’ve learned to love
the babies they got it won’t be easy for them to give them up, but —’

‘But a new kitten might help,’ George finished and Gus looked uncomfortable.

‘I was afraid it’d sound like that. Anyway, it’s out of our hands. Social Services are dealing with that side of the case. I’m glad I don’t have to.’

‘Me too.’

‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘By the way, why did they die? The babies Collinson put in the places of the Chowdary, Popodopoulos and Lennon children?’

It was George’s turn to be uncomfortable. ‘It was Valium. It’s not a killer usually, of course. Generally you’d only die from Valium if a lorryload fell on you, but these were fragile babies and the heavy doses they were given to make sure they didn’t move or cry during the journey and give away their hiding place flattened them so much they died of — well, they just stopped breathing. So it was a sort of cot death. But I should have found the drug in the PM I did.’ She brooded. ‘It’s not what you’d look for, that’s the thing. And anyway, I’m not even sure I’d have been able to find it.’

‘The last thing you have to do is feel bad about what you might have missed,’ he said. ‘Like the Oxford case, ducks, if you hadn’t pressed and pushed we’d never have got anywhere. It’s your case, not ours, and you did a good job on it.’

‘Yes, Gus,’ she said in a mock cockney voice, and he flicked his fingers at his invisible hat brim and said gruffly, ‘That’s OK, babe,’ in the broadest Brooklyn twang he could manage.

Much later that night, curled up together in front of the flickering flames of her gas fire, George said sleepily, ‘Gus?’

‘Hmm?’

‘I suppose you don’t quote Shakespeare much, do you?’

‘Try me.’

‘
Hamlet
, Act One, Scene II. Lines seventy-two to seventy-three.’

‘Hmm. What about ‘em?’

‘Ma said it to me. Told me it’d make me feel better about her. I meant to look it up as soon as I got home but …’

He laughed softly and she felt the vibration of his chuckle through the bare skin of his chest against her cheek. ‘All my fault, with my nasty seductive ways. Arf arf, once aboard the sofa and the girl was mine! Popeye’s got nothing on me!’

‘Sofa?’ she said and it was her turn to chuckle. ‘We weren’t on it all that long.’

‘Complaining?’

‘No, I like hearthrugs. So you don’t know that bit of
Hamlet
?’

‘Who said I didn’t?’

‘Then what is it?’

He was silent, thinking, and then said softly, ‘“Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.”‘

She was quiet for a long time and then said simply, ‘Oh.’

He held her closer still, if that were possible. ‘It’s all right, George,’ he said. ‘I’m here, you know. And I intend to stay.’

She took a deep breath and relaxed. ‘D’you know, Gus, I rather thought you did. And I’m very glad about it. I think Ma will be too.’ And she sighed again and closed her eyes against the flicker of the flames, and fell asleep.