George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (46 page)

They all looked at James, but he showed no reaction at all. ‘She’d nosed out within a couple of weeks of his arrival that he was a phoney, that he wasn’t qualified, that his references were totally naff. But she told him if he played the game her way she’d help him. And she did. Introduced him to her friends at St Dymphna’s to get some extra experience there. Did all sorts of things, it seems, to make him aware of any gaps in his knowledge, really coached him in the sort of hospital background stuff you can’t get from books, only from actually living the life. Fun at first for James. Till she started to ask for money. First he had to give her his extra earnings from St Dymphna’s. He did it. Then she wanted some of his money from Old East. She must have had a hell of a nest egg squirrelled away somewhere. But that wasn’t enough. She also got him to spy on other people and to do other little jobs for her. Right, James?’

Again there was no response from the wide-eyed figure on the couch. Gus sighed softly and went on. ‘She got him to, among other things, pinch the files she wanted from George’s office.’

‘I can’t understand that,’ Zack said. ‘All she had to do was go in and help herself, surely?’

‘And be an immediate suspect with all the rest of the lab
staff? Do me a favour,’ Gus said, and George, who had opened her mouth to make exactly the same point, subsided.

‘No. It was better to have a faked robbery that gave her a complete alibi. She was pretty pissed off, of course, when she only got hold of the notes of two of the people she’d killed.’

‘How can we be sure of that?’ Zack said, suddenly argumentative. ‘I mean, she’s dead and she can’t be asked, and —’

‘I’ll come to that,’ Gus said, very magisterial all of a sudden. ‘Hear me out. She was, I said, pretty pissed off to find one of the files missing. Took her a while to get it, but she did eventually, the easy way. She had copies of George’s personal keys, just as she has of every key she ever got her hands on —or could borrow for an hour or two. She simply used them to nip into the flat and help herself. She’s probably been in and out of your flat, George, umpteen times.’

‘It makes me feel sick to think of it,’ George said. Her voice shook with controlled loathing. ‘I’ll have to move. I’ll never feel comfortable there again.’

‘I know,’ Gus said. ‘There’s time to talk about that, and I promise we will. I have a few thoughts of my own on that subject. Right now back to my case. Let’s get this clear. She gets James to steal the files because she wants the records of what happened to those three people. She also made him help her stage the threats on her life, which were designed solely and wholly to make sure no one would ever suspect her of any involvement in those other killings, if ever there was any doubt about them. The thing is she was a fool, really — the sort of clever-clever fool who ruins it by over-egging the pudding. Because of the ways she used to kill both Tony Mendez and Lally Lamark, they would never have been labelled as murders if she hadn’t added so many fancy touches. Over-dramatic, that was the thing. Well, there you go. She
did
overdo it, so we investigated more than we might have done. Thank God.’ He brooded for a while. ‘I wish I had enough staff and enough money in my lousy budget to treat every
case the way I’d like to. But there isn’t that much manpower and bloody money in the whole stinking system.’

‘Watch it, buster,’ George murmured. ‘Your politics are showing.’

‘Eh? Well, all right, I’ll go on. So, she kills Tony on account of he was getting fed up with paying her so much of his money, and also was concerned he was drinking too much again. He might get talkative when he was boozed — a hell of a risk. So he had to go. That’s my guess, and it can never be more than a guess, I know. But it strikes me as bloody obvious. He probably threatened to tell all and admit to the people at St Dymphna’s that he’d been knocking back the old booze, and ask for their help and support. Even if he didn’t threaten to tell all, he was a risk. When he was afraid of losing his job at Old East he was vulnerable. When he stopped being vulnerable, there was nothing to keep him giving her money the way he had all those years. Poor bastard. Once he’d decided to throw in the towel and confess then she’d had to kill him. She’d have gone down for blackmail. And she knew it.’

‘
You
can’t know that,’ Zack said, sounding mulish.

‘James said she did,’ Gus reminded him. ‘He was the one who had to do her cover-up, remember. It’s been killing the poor little bastard. All he wanted was to play doctors, without having to do all the academic work for seven years, or however long it is. Probably just wasn’t up to it. Not enough brain power. But he wouldn’t have killed anyone. Once she’d done it though, and got him sucked in by making him do errands that had seemed innocent enough to him till afterwards, well, he was unable to extricate himself.’

‘Making him an innocent victim?’ Zack jeered. ‘Robbing George’s office of files? And breaking into Sheila’s own flat?’

‘She told him that the robbery of George’s files was a gag. Ordered him to mess the files up a bit, just to annoy George, and to take out the ones she asked for as much as a joke, as anything else. She also asked him to rob her own flat as an insurance scam. That upset him too, but he felt totally helpless.
Like I said, a clever bitch, Sheila. She also gave him the box of chocolates to put in the ENT Ward, said she wanted the staff to know how kind George was being. He did that gladly, imagining she’d been given them directly when she arrived in the ward after the car fire, which again, she fixed herself. Sheila knew precisely what she was doing, and though she took risks, she knew how far she could go. Which was as far as risking other people eating those chocolates too — Sister Chaplin, say.’

‘She poisoned those chocolates herself?’ George shook her head unbelievingly. ‘It’s crazy!’

‘Crime is,’ Gus said. ‘This sort. It’s hardly the activity of a rational person. Sheila wasn’t rational. She wanted what she wanted and she’d kill to get it. Remember, she’d been building this up for years. She’d had a hospital reputation as a husband-hunter for ages — everyone knew that, really, even if they did imply it was just sex she was after. And when a desire gets unsatisfied for years, it can literally drive people crazy. I think that’s what happened to Sheila Keen. She’d reached the stage of desperation. She was getting old, so old that every month that passed made her more and more fearful she’d never get her man, and she’d do anything to get what she so badly wanted. And used dumb innocent idiots like that boy over there to help her do it. He was just a handy weapon to her. Corton isn’t the brightest, is he? If he were he’d have got himself into medical school.’

James still lay silently on the couch, but now his eyes moved and he looked appealingly at Gus.

‘Sorry, mate,’ Gus said to him. ‘But whether you like it or not, it’s true. You’ve been a right Charlie. Let me spell it out more. You fiddled with that bottle in the Beetle cupboard in the lab and changed the chemicals. A gag, she said. I bet. Her and her gags! It must have been obvious it was dangerous. You saw afterwards what it did to Jerry. You must have felt pretty Godawful about that.’

This time James closed his eyes. It was clear he accepted all that Gus said as accurate.

‘So there you are. She killed Tony to stop him turning on her. She killed Lally Lamark because she was a smart lady, almost as smart as Sheila, who spotted something in a set of notes that alerted her. Not her own notes at all probably, but some others — the fact Sheila said it was her own notes she wanted to look at doesn’t mean it was true, does it? Sheila showed her someone else’s notes, secretly — and burned the evidence when you caught her, remember. But when she got the request from Lally, for whatever it was, she realized this was a potentially dangerous opponent. And knowing how to fiddle with the woman’s insulin pen, she did just that.’

‘You can’t know that,’ George protested. ‘That has to be surmise.’

‘Tell me a better one,’ Gus said.

George was silent and Gus nodded. ‘See what I mean? Some of the time we have to use a bit of informed imagination. Not with Pam Frean, though. No need for imagination there.’

He stopped and Zack lifted his head, and then bent it again. He seemed to thrum with tension, and for a moment George felt aware of embarrassment, as though she knew Gus was about to strip him naked, and she’d have to sit and let him do it.

‘Poor Pam Frean,’ Gus said gently. ‘Poor little Pam. That one is down to you, Zack, isn’t it? You didn’t kill her, of course, but if you hadn’t played your games with her, she’d be alive still.’

Zack said nothing. He sat very still with his head down, staring at his hands on his lap as though he’d never seen them before.

‘So let’s get it out of the way. You’re the man Sheila had her beady eyes on, isn’t that so? You flirted with her, and she chatted you up like a right ’un, making it very clear she wanted you. It wasn’t only sex, was it? She wanted a clever, successful
husband with a good future and the promise of a good income she could fiddle with. She wasn’t above having a bit of fun with a man like Jerry Swann’ — George made a grimace —‘but she wanted her own way when it came to the real business of marriage. It took her a long time before she realized that you weren’t up for that. That you chatted up every reasonably attractive woman just because she was a woman.’

‘Gee, Gus, thanks for making me feel real good,’ George murmured.

‘Don’t be daft.’ Gus was sharp. ‘It’s not your fault, it’s not any woman’s fault when men behave like that, any more than it was Zack’s fault, except for swanning from one girl to another, letting ’em think he cared about ’em.’

‘Get on with it, friend,’ Zack said. ‘You might as well make a job of it’

‘OK. Well, for you women are like a box of toys. You play games with them until you don’t want them any more and fancy a new one.’ He didn’t look at George, but she knew she had reddened. ‘But one of your toys fell heavily in love. This to Pam Frean wasn’t a game but a grand passion. Zacharius was her God-given man, not to put it too high. And when you’d had your fling and wanted to move on, she found she was pregnant.’

‘I thought she used a contraceptive, for Chrissakes!’ Zack burst out. ‘What girl doesn’t, these days? The girl was so sweet, and eager, so —’

‘So much in love,’ Gus said, ‘that it seemed to her the right thing to make love. No matter what her religious training and education. She loved you. And hers was a loving religion, not the cruel one everyone thought it was. Strict but loving. That’s your problem, you see, Zack. They simply fall on their backs for you.’ Again, he didn’t look at George. ‘As Sheila did too. Only when she found out she had a pregnant rival, she didn’t panic. She was much cleverer than that — her sort is. She
befriended
her. Found out that she was planning to go home and have her baby and learn to live without the love of
her life, while devoting herself to God and her child. At first Pam felt guilty — when she was first diagnosed by Hattie —but after that, she was OK about it. Had plans for the future, once she got over her initial shock. So, Sheila had to act. She couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t get more involved with Pam, under the circumstances. The birth of a baby does have that effect on people, even Don Juans like you. And she couldn’t risk that because you were to be
her
property. If she couldn’t have you, no one would.’

‘But Sheila took it so well when I told her I wasn’t — that I already had a wife, and had no notion of being divorced because my wife’s a Québecois and a Catholic’ Zack said it almost despairingly.

‘Oh, took it excellent well, i’truth,’ said Gus in rolling Shakespearean tones. ‘So well she invites you to come out with her for a last farewell party and has every intention of pushing you under a train. Once George told her we were close to cracking the other two killings, she had to cut her losses, to keep us off her trail, didn’t she?’

‘It was my fault then, that …’ George looked stricken, but Gus shook his head at her.

‘Don’t blame yourself. She’d have done it eventually, now she was convinced Zack wasn’t going to come across with a wedding ring. And if she hadn’t been so cocksure about her hold over James, and made no effort to hide from him how she felt about things, she’d have done it too. And you’d have gone down in history as a triple murderer who got done in by the person you’d meant to make your fourth victim.’

‘So I’m not so stupid after all.’ James’s voice came thick and cracked from the couch. ‘Am I?’

‘What?’ Gus said.

‘Not so thick. It was me who realized what she was going to do, me who realized she’d killed the others, so she was going to kill Zack. And me who stopped her.’

‘Yes,’ Zack said. ‘Thanks.’ And he meant it, painful and spare though it sounded.

‘I’m ashamed,’ George said. ‘I should have spotted it — Pam Frean’s death being definitely murder, I mean.’

‘Why should you?’ Gus said sensibly. ‘Jesus, no one would have, in your position. I reckon she used George Joseph Smith’s method — the Brides in the Bath guy from a hundred years or so ago. Nice girlfriend comes round to spend the evening with preggy Pam and all that stuff, and then when she gets tired she says she’ll help her in her bath, wash her back and so forth. In the tub Pam goes, and Sheila, who must have spiked her whatever-they-drank with Valium, takes her by the ankles and pulls hard, and down she goes, and stays down, because Sheila keeps her legs in the air. That’s all there is to it, apart from tapping out a suitable message on the ward computer as soon as she got back to Old East. And because people are so used to seeing Sheila all over the place, they pay no attention to her.’ He shook his head with a sort of admiration. ‘You’ve got to hand it to her. She got the tone of the note spot on, didn’t she? And found the ideal way to kill her. It wasn’t hard, not even for a small woman.’

‘The girl died at once of a sort of shock reaction,’ George said. ‘I’d better read up some Victorian forensic pathology, I guess.’

‘Don’t be ashamed of being conned by the likes of Sheila Keen,’ Gus said. ‘I was too. And I’ve been dealing with bad ’uns a lot longer than what you have, lady. And don’t forget, you knew her so well, had known her for years.’