Cutting Edge (26 page)

“Where’s Lynn Kellogg?” Resnick demanded, pushing angrily into the CID room.

“RSPCA,” said Naylor. “PDSA. One of those.”

Divine sat at the furthest end of the room, one-half of his face like a battered pumpkin several days after Halloween.

“You!” Resnick said, jabbing his finger. “My office. Now.”

Information about Amanda Hooson was being laboriously obtained, systematically annotated, organized. As an exercise it was less than cost-efficient, heavy on personnel, essential:

“Mandy,” said a student from her social-sciences group. “God! She used to hate it when I called her that. Anyway, yeh, she was just, you know, pretty straight, together. All she wanted to do was get her 2.1 and get back out into the real world. Wasted too much of her life already, that’s what she said. Mandy. God, I still can’t take it in. Amanda.”

The lecturer tapped the bowl of his pipe and began scraping away at the interior with the blunt end of a penknife. “She was rather more serious than a number of our students, that would have to be said. Older, you see, not old, but older. Here from choice, real choice, not like so many of them, arriving on the doorstep straight from school simply because they forgot to get off the bus.” After the dredging came the replenishing, the tamping down. “Great shame, picked up a bit in her final year, might even have got a first.”

“Hot weather, oh yes, sit out on the grass across from PB, hoick her skirt up and sunbathe for hours, ginger-beer shandy and some book about the extended family in Mozambique, homelessness in the inner cities. Not like some of them, stagger about between the Beano and Viz and still end up with a headache. No, she was a serious girl, woman, I suppose you’d have to say. I liked her. Liked her a lot.”

“Amanda! You’re kidding! I mean, I don’t want to put her down, especially after what’s happened, that’s dreadful, it really is. But, I don’t know, the idea of Amanda going out with any bloke, especially a student, well, if you’d have known her … I can’t think of another way of putting it: stuck-up, that’s what she was. No social life. Anything that wasn’t on the syllabus, forget it!”

“Yes, I don’t know who he was, don’t know his name or anything, but yes, she was seeing somebody. I’m sure of it.”

“Amanda came to my seminars, sat there writing it all down, sometimes if I coughed I think she made a little notation in brackets. Good essays, of course. Solid. But discussion—never contributed a word. Not my idea of a good student, I’m afraid, but there you are. I could show you her grades, if you think that might be of any use.”

“Terrible, terrible, terrible. A tragedy. A tragic waste of a young life. Truly, truly terrible. Tragic. Um?”

“We went through this period, last year. Badminton, right? I was beating her time after time, 15–6, 15–7, 15–5. Found out that if I kept it high to her backhand, she just couldn’t cope. Amanda came back after the holiday and wiped the floor with me. She’d found this guy, county player, talked him into teaching her, two hours a day for three weeks. Backhand smash, drive, backhand lob, she could do the lot. Not brilliantly. She was never what you’d call a natural. But she was like that with anything, anything she wanted,
really
wanted to do. Got down and worked at it, hard as she could. Little things, important things, it didn’t matter. Amanda had these lists in the back of her diary and she’d tick them off one at a time until they were done. After that she’d start a new list. Goal-oriented, I think that’s the term for it. Amanda would have known; if she didn’t she’d have been off to the library to look it up.”

“This diary,” asked Patel, “can you describe it?”

Cheryl pursed her lips and nodded. The shadows beneath her eyes were deep and dark from crying. “Nothing special, not one of those—what-d’you-call-’em—Filofaxes, nothing like that. Sort of slim and black, leather, you know the kind? Student year, I think it was, September to September. Carried it with her all the time.”

“I see.”

“You haven’t found it?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet.” Patel smiled and when he did so, Cheryl thought, not for the first time, what a nice man he probably was; what a shame he was a policeman. “I don’t really know,” Patel said. “I’ll certainly check. Now …” turning a page of his note book, “… perhaps you can tell me something about her friends …”

It was Millington who, having temporarily talked himself out of the hijack detail and finding himself with half an hour in the inquiry room, chanced to glance at a report form waiting to be accessed on to the computer. Amanda Hooson, twenty-six, previous education, West Notts College, previously employed for two years as an ODA at the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary and then back to the main hospital in the city.

“ODA?” Millington asked. “What’s one of them?”

“Search me.”

“Lord knows.”

“Wait up,” called one of the civilian operators, looking away from his screen, “I don’t know what the initials stand for exactly, but what it is, what they do, assist the anesthetist, make sure the gear’s all in working order, operations and the like. That’s what it is. ODA. Yes. Saw one on television once …
What’s My Line?
”

Thirty-three

Lynn hadn’t been able to work out if the woman was more worried about her floor-length musquash and her sable stole or the stupid dogs. She didn’t know which might raise the woman up higher in her opinion and finally decided it was neither. How could you have respect for someone who drank Perrier out of cut glass and allowed her Rottweilers to crap on the kitchen floor rather than take them for a walk after dark? Nervous of getting mugged, she got burgled instead. “It was stripped down to the original boards in here,” she’d said, pointing at the kitchen floor, “but we had that taken up and new quarry tiles put down. So much easier. Scoop up and swab down, a matter of minutes.” Right, Lynn had thought, that and the money to pay someone to come in every morning, do it for you.

Five hundred yards away, Lynn knew there were families living in flats with rising damp, cockroaches, hot-water systems that broke down again before the repair van had reached the end of the street. “It doesn’t matter, Lynnie,” her mother had used to say, “not where you live, it’s how you live. My great-aunt brought up a family of five in two rooms with a tin bath you set down before the fire and an outside lavvie where the water froze across the bowl November to March. And you could walk into that place anytime, no warning, and not find a cup that wasn’t washed up or a half-inch of dirt on or under anything.” Well, good for Great-aunt Queenie. Knew her place and kept it spotless. Huge bosoms and facial hair; a backside that made horses tremble. Lynn would have loved to see her weighing into the hardship officer at the DSS.

She swung left off the main road and turned quickly left again opposite the disused lido, bringing the car to a halt facing the university lake. Without thinking, she had been heading, not towards her own place, not back to the station, but to Ian Carew’s. God’s gift, that’s what he thought he was. God’s sodding gift! The way he’d come prancing past her while she was sitting behind the wheel, hours watching the short length of street, front of his house. Clever bastard, just to prove he could do it, show he didn’t care. Sneaked out the back and gone off who knows where. A lot of people would have gone back in the same way, left her thinking he was inside all the while, a good boy, doing whatever good boys did. But, no, not in his nature. Cocky! Couldn’t resist letting her see him, supercilious grin on his face and knowing she’d be looking at the way the material stretched tight across his behind. Much as Lynn hated to admit it, he had a great arse!

That wasn’t what she was doing, was it? Fancying the man? Fantasizing about him? If she were, one picture of Karen Archer should do the trick.

Did you want him to have sex, make love to you?

The marks on Karen Archer’s face, the eyes that could never once return your gaze.

He said he didn’t believe me. Said I was dying for it
.

The police in Devon had reported no sign of her; she still had not contacted her parents. What happened next? Posters in shopping centers and outside police stations up and down the country? An urgent message on Radio Four, between the weather forecast and the news? Or wait until a body turned up somewhere months from now? The wasteland south of Sneinton, along by the railway line. Wedged between the lock gates on the Trent Canal. Under a mulch of leaves and earth in the middle of Colwick Woods.

And now …?

Amanda Hooson had been murdered in the early hours of Saturday afternoon, exactly when Carew had apparently been out of the house she had been so uselessly watching. Common sense told Lynn that if he had had anything to do with that, the last thing he would have done was strut past and throw suspicion on himself. Not with Lynn sitting there, unwittingly providing him with an alibi.

Or would he? It depended just how clever, how cool he really was.

Lynn locked the car and walked towards the lake, not the crowds today of youngsters waiting to hire rowboat or canoe and get out on the lake; lads who splashed each other with oars, occasionally overturning their boats and falling in; couples who moored alongside the small island and made love in the undergrowth, feeding the condoms afterwards to unsuspecting ducks. A stroll around might clear her mind of this, at least, encourage her to think of other things: whatever was going on with Kevin and Debbie Naylor, whether they’d get through the year without divorce; if her mother could persuade her dad to talk to the doctor about his depression, and if ever he did what the doctor might say. There were days, Lynn thought, buying herself one of the last ice-creams of the year, when she wished she had more problems in her own life, save her worrying so much about those of others.

“I was wondering,” Resnick said, “if you had five minutes? Couple of things you could help me with. Perhaps.”

“Five pairs of hands might be more useful.” Sarah Leonard brushed an arm across her forehead; a curl of dark hair had escaped beneath the front of her blue and white cap. Something about a woman, Resnick thought, almost as tall as yourself; the closeness of the mouth. If last time she had reminded him of Rachel, now there was no such misrecognition: he knew who she was and she was herself.

“Let me change this catheter and I’ll be with you,” Sarah said.

“Fine,” Resnick nodded, wincing a little at the thought.

“Don’t worry, I’ll wash my hands first.”

They went out into the corridor and stood at a window, looking down onto Derby Road. “I don’t know how you do it,” Resnick said.

“What? Catheters, colostomy bags, enemas, that sort of thing?”

“I suppose so. Partly, anyway.”

Sarah grinned. “It isn’t all piss and shit, you know. James Herriot without the friendly collie dog yapping encouragement round your feet. A lot of the time it’s a good laugh.”

Resnick looked back at her, disbelieving.

“The other day,” Sarah said, “this young lad on the ward. Asked one of the student nurses to fetch me over, something seriously troubling him. ‘Staff,’ he says, ‘I don’t know what to do, I’ve got this erection and it won’t go away. Can you help me do something about it?’” Sarah laughed again, remembering.

“Dare I ask?” said Resnick.

“Took him along a bucket and told him to get on with it.”

“What I wanted to know …” Resnick began.

“Not you as well?” A knowing grin, sending him up just a little.

Resnick could see his own reflection in the glass, a mixture of embarrassment and pleasure. One day, he thought, if I should ever get to know you better … “What I need,” Resnick said.

“Yes?”

“More in the nature of information.”

“Go ahead.”

“An ODA.”

“What about them?”

“What do they do? That would be a start.”

“Operating Department Assistant. Attendant. Some hospitals, they call them Anesthetist Technicians.”

“And that’s their function, assisting the anesthetist during an operation?”

“The main one, yes. Supervising the machines, making sure they’re connected correctly so that the right mixture of oxygen and gases gets through to the patient. But they can do more than that, act as scrub nurse …”

“Scrub nurse?”

“Handles the instruments during the operation, passes them to the surgeon …”

“Scalpel.”

“Scalpel. Exactly. Whatever he’s using. Hands them over, takes them back.”

“Responsible job.”

“And she doesn’t spend the day dealing with fecal matter.”

“Amanda Hooson,” Resnick said. “Don’t suppose you knew her?”

Sarah shook her head. “Should I?”

“Apparently she used to work here.”

“As an ODA?”

Resnick nodded.

“We’ve twelve theaters, fifteen to twenty ODAs. When was she here?”

“Left around two years ago.”

Sarah gave it a little thought. Below, traffic was driving into the hospital in a constipated stream. “No, I’m sorry. Though there is something about the name.”

“How recently have you listened to the news?”

Sarah’s shoulders slumped. “Oh, God, it’s her.”

“Afraid so.”