George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (29 page)

She thought for a moment. ‘Probably. Tell me what it is.’

‘Keep your distance from him till I get the stuff I’ve asked for from Canada. They’ve promised me a detailed run-down on his history there, a real digging-out of everything there is. I’ll even know how often he went to the loo, once they report.
But till then be careful. That’s not an unreasonable request, is it?’

‘You’re so
changeable
,’ she said. ‘On Sunday you encouraged me to meet him on Laburnum Ward and now you’re saying —’

‘That was before you spilled your bibhl at him,’ he said. ‘That’s changed everything.’

She took a few moments to answer. ‘Well, I suppose so. I don’t think it’s necessary, as I say, but —’

‘Never mind what you think. Let me indulge myself. I won’t feel good until I have concrete evidence that this guy has no form, and we can accept him as what he says he is, a nasty piece of work after his own interests the whole time, but stopping short of murder and mayhem to get what he wants.’

‘That’s putting it a bit strong.’

‘Really? How would you put it?’

She thought again. ‘Maybe not a nasty piece of work?’

‘Selfish then? Thoughtless? Something like that?’

‘Oh, well, I suppose … OK. In the work context then, a nasty piece of work. But not a person who’d deliberately harm someone else.’

‘Except in their pocket. Or their self-esteem, hmm?’

She pulled a little face. ‘You’ve made your point. So what am I to do?’

‘Be too busy to talk to him if he calls, and certainly too busy to meet him or work on anything with him. Would that be difficult?’

‘Refusing to talk on the phone might be, if I happened to answer it when he calls.’

‘Then get someone else to answer your phone and only put through the calls you want. Stop making difficulties, George, you know I’m right about this.’

‘OK, OK, I’ll do it your way. Till you hear from Canada.’

‘Yeah. And by then — probably next week — I should have some more stuff about those three deaths. I’ve put quite a few of my people on to it. Fortunately we’re not too pushed right now, so I can use them without running into overtime. You
think you’ve got budget problems in the NHS? Try the bloody Bill, ducky, and then you’ll know what budgets are about!’

In some ways it seemed a very long week. First of all the weather had changed for good, settling to a series of hot dry days that made being cooped up in the lab far more irksome than it usually was. There were a few post-mortems to do, and the hot weather made a couple of them particularly unpleasant. One was the body of a man who had hanged himself in his top-floor flat three weeks before he was found; the other a newborn infant who had been hidden on a building site: as well as being noisome, the evidence of George’s investigation showed that the child had been abandoned alive, and had died of exposure and dehydration which made it the sort of case which upset her most. There was a limit, as she told Jerry grimly, to the amount of professional detachment she could summon up.

Jerry seemed to show no sign of after-effects from his experience. He brushed away any attempts to fuss over him with his usual jokes, and within a few days it was all as though it had never happened.

It was different however when Sheila came back to work. She dressed herself in black, even though the weather was by now exhaustingly hot; the string of sweltering days that had come in the third week of the month had settled to a prolonged and uncomfortably humid heatwave that had everyone drooping about the place and squabbling over which bench should be allowed to use one of the two precious electric fans which were the department’s only concession to air conditioning. Sheila would sit in her corner, blonde and pale and wispy, all of it accentuated by the blackness of her dress under her white coat, making everyone uneasy as she sat and suffered bravely. George was glad to see her return and grateful that she had escaped any long-term effects from her experiences, but within two days was as exasperated with her as she had ever been, and so was everyone else.

But at least that meant everything felt normal again. They plodded through the day’s workloads, spending their lunch-times, like everyone else, in the courtyard on a motley array of benches and old chairs and tattered rugs that had appeared from heaven knew where to accommodate them all, and falling off duty at the end of the day to spend the breathless sweating evenings at home. No one had much energy for anything else; even visits to the swimming pool gave little pleasure, full as it was of shrieking children. George learned to settle for long periods spent taking cold showers followed by padding around her flat, dripping wet and naked, to allow the water to dry on her. It was as effective a cooling system as any other she could devise, and taken in conjunction with the consumption of a great deal of ice water (and noisily chewed ice) she got through the heat somehow.

She saw little of Gus. There had been a sudden upsurge of work at the Ratcliffe Street nick, with a decision made to work over one of the local housing estates where drug-dealing was the normal way of life. Edicts had come down from the top, Gus told George irritably, that this particular nest of hornets was to be flushed out. (‘Not that it’ll make a blind bit of difference in the long run,’ Gus growled. ‘The buggers’ll only move over to the next patch. But at least we’ll be rid of ’em.’) And that meant he worked late almost every day. He would arrive at her flat after she had gone to sleep and fall into bed beside her, only to wake her with his exhausted snoring. Then he’d be up and gone before she woke again in the mornings. It wasn’t much fun one way and another, George decided. She didn’t even have the satisfaction of trying to dodge Zack to keep her mind occupied.

Because he made not the slightest attempt to talk to her, or to see her. He was never in the courtyard at lunchtimes like almost all the rest of the hospital’s staff, and he certainly never phoned her. Once or twice, in a spirit of contrariness, she went up to the canteen for lunch, thinking perhaps he was taking his meals there, but there was no sign of him. It
shouldn’t be so easy to keep out of his way, she found herself thinking crossly. Unless he’s decided that, for all his talk of still being teammates, he doesn’t want to work with someone who accused him of being a malicious type who meddled with people’s cars and poisoned their chocolates. A disconcerting thought, that.

But at last things improved. The weather remained as hot as ever — hotter in fact — but at least the workload in the laboratory eased and George was freed to take life a little easier as the last week in June plodded on its breathless way. She was actually able to take some of her paperwork out into the courtyard to sit in the shade of the main block where it was a little cooler — though not a lot — than her stuffy little office.

She didn’t notice him coming towards her; unaware until he touched her shoulder and made her jump. She peered up in the bright sunlight, shading her eyes. At first she could see only the outline of his head but then he moved slightly so that he blocked out the direct light and she could see his face.

‘Oh,’ she said, not sure how to react. ‘Hello.’

‘I’m not going to be a pest,’ he said. ‘I just wanted you to know how glad I am that you’ve made sure about me. I know you’ll be reassured when you see it all, and then maybe we can get back to normal, huh? I gather they’ve collected all they need now?’

‘I’m sorry, Zack,’ she said, and genuinely was. ‘I haven’t the remotest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, come on, George! You must know they’ve been making enquiries about me back home! Didn’t you put them up to it?’

She felt her face flame. ‘Er — making —?’ she began and then stopped.

He shook his head at her, clearly amused. ‘Listen, hon, you didn’t think I left all my friends behind in Canada and never gave them another thought, did you? Especially my girlfriends. I wasn’t exactly a monk, after all. We exchange letters
all the time, and phone calls. Faxes, even!’ He split his face into a grin. ‘I knew you were investigating me, on account of so many people were in such a hurry to call me up and ask me what the hell I’d been up to that there were obvious flat-foots buzzing around asking questions about me. And I thought, you can’t blame the lady. She needs a bit more reassurance than just my word for it. So I thought I’d keep my head well down until you had all the info you wanted and we could pick up where we left off. I’ve got my presentation to the funders coming up and I sure as hell hoped we’d have all this sorted in time for you to help me with that. I heard yesterday they’ve gone away — the investigators, that is, gone away from Montreal — and I thought, right. She’ll have her report now. If I’m wrong, I’m sorry and I’ll vanish into the woodwork again until you have. Call me then, huh?’ And as coolly as though they had been discussing the weather he lifted a hand in a sort of salute and went away across the burned and scrubby grass to the main block, leaving her staring after him.

She called Gus as soon as she got back to the lab, seething with anger. The embarrassment of it had been intense. That Zack had known he was being investigated was bad enough; that he should think she had instigated it was much worse.

It took some time to track Gus down. First of all he was out with his men on some sort of stake-out, or so she guessed from the guardedness of the policewoman on the phone, so she left a message, fairly curtly making the point that it was important. Then she sat and seethed till late afternoon when, sick of waiting for a return call, she tried to reach him again. This time she was told he was in the building and no, they did not know if he’d received her message but they’d certainly see to it that he did now. Again she sat and fumed, waiting for him to call. At last, just after half past six when all the staff had gone and there was just herself sweating in her lonely office, the phone trilled and his voice filled her ear as soon as she snatched it up.

‘So what’s the panic, doll? Has friend Zack suddenly arrived with a knife between his teeth and a gun in each hand?’

‘Very funny,’ she snapped. ‘You only say that because you know damned well he’s OK.’ She told him succinctly what had happened that afternoon. ‘I never felt such a goddamn fool in my life. It’s like being caught out being a Peeping Tom.’

He laughed. ‘I suppose it was. Well, no harm done.’

‘No harm done!’ She was lost for words.

‘I’ve got the stuff here,’ he said, seeming oblivious of her wrath. ‘I’ve had it a day or two but frankly I’ve been up to my hocks in crack-dealers and the like and hardly had time to look. But I took a quick squint so I knew there was nothing to worry about. I’ve looked again just now before I called. It seems he’s as pure as the driven snow’

‘Gus, you’ve had that for a couple of
days?
And only just got round to — You are the absolute —’

‘Listen, doll,’ he said, his voice suddenly very crisp. ‘I’m dealing with a lot of real crime here. I’m not saying what happened there at Old East isn’t a crime — someone made attacks on one of your staff, sure, and you’ve had a couple of deaths you don’t like the look of — but that isn’t as urgent as completing a drugs round-up once it’s been started, especially when I’d taken a preliminary look like I said and could see you weren’t at risk. It’s a matter of priorities, right?’

She bit her lip. ‘Oh, hell, I’m sorry Gus. It’s just that I felt so —’

‘I can imagine.’ He was sympathetic. ‘Now, listen, doll. I’ll be finished here in about an hour. What say we meet at the pub, have a drink and then a nice fish supper? Best in town, they tell me.’

‘OK. If we can have the drink outside in the shade and a table next to a fan.’

‘You’re on,’ he said. ‘And, George?’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Even though it would seem this Zack guy’s OK, as far as
his history is concerned, do me a favour. Go on keeping your distance, will you?’

‘Why? If you felt safe not hurrying to give me the report, then —’

‘A clean history doesn’t necessarily mean he’s as reliable as he might be. People change, after all.’

She chuckled, feeling much better now. ‘Dearest Gus, I do so enjoy your jealousy. It warms me in the winter and cools me comfortably in a heatwave. Lovely! See you at the pub.’ And she hung up, well pleased with herself. No matter what reasons he gave for his actions, their true nature was quite clear to her. It was almost shaming, she thought, to enjoy it so much.

The pub was pleasanter than it might have been on so hot an evening, because most of the drinkers were outside, cluttering up the pavement so that pedestrians could hardly get by, and the interior was therefore cooler since in their absence the fans whirring in every corner could do their jobs properly. He brought her iced mineral water, which was all she could face, and settled himself beside her at a corner table under an engraved window with his usual half-pint. She watched him take a deep draught and shook her head.

‘How you can drink warm beer is beyond me,’ she said. ‘Put some ice in, hon, make yourself comfortable.’

‘Iced beer?’ he said and shuddered. ‘That’s a treasonable offence in this part of London. Here. Read the report and shut up. You’ll feel cooler sooner if you do.’

She read, quickly but thoroughly, leafing through the dozen or so pages of flimsy fax paper as he sat peaceably watching her and seeming to find some pleasure in doing so. She was aware of his gaze at first, but soon became absorbed in the picture that was formed by the material in front of her.

Zoltan Istvan Zacharius, aged thirty-nine, was, she read, precisely as he had described himself. The details he had given of his history were spelled out here in detail: his departure from his native Hungary as a child with his mother; his settling in Montreal; his success at school and later at
college and medical school. There were also encomiums from his teachers and his colleagues, some of them very eminent people indeed; and even grateful comments from patients he had treated or used as research material. There was a list of his involvement in his community, with membership of student committees and inauguration of successful fund-raising initiatives for the hospital’s benefit jostling with accounts of awards won and prizes conferred on him. No one, it seemed, had a bad word for him. He had worked hard in his Canadian days, been fun to know, had lived a reasonably virtuous life — there was no hint of any impropriety, financial, political, personal or otherwise — and altogether was exactly what he seemed: an industrious gifted person with much to contribute to his chosen discipline.