‘Most certainly I did. There was no other construction to be put upon the words, whatever her counsel alleged at the trial. Lawyers can twist almost anything anyone says to their client’s advantage. The concepts of truth and the sanctity of actual fact appear to be quite foreign to them.’
He paused, as though giving Trish an opportunity to protest, but she saw no point in even trying to explain the limits and demands of
her
profession.
‘And, by the way, I do not believe for one instant that that woman was concerned to end her father’s suffering.’
‘Dr Foscutt—’
But he was well away and nothing Trish could say was going to stop him now.
‘If Deborah Gibbert had had an ounce of decency or kindness, she would have been able to do her duty by her father. But she hadn’t and so she couldn’t. She killed him to save herself inconvenience.’
‘So you, yourself, never had one moment’s doubt about her guilt?’ Trish asked slowly, using her voice to lower the emotional temperature in the room, which was becoming unbearable.
‘I would remind you once again, Ms Maguire, that the autopsy confirmed my original suspicions that his heart had stopped during suffocation, and a court of law convicted her.
Ergo
, she is guilty. These researches of yours are a waste of time, as I hope you will explain to Mr Chaze when you report back to him.’
‘As I understand it, Dr Foscutt—’ Trish broke off. His habit of punctuating every comment with her name must be catching. She started again: ‘As I understand it, there are no definitive indications of suffocation to be found at autopsy.’
He glared at her, as though trying to intimidate her with the force of his unshareable expertise.
‘Fluff and feathers in the larynx appear only in novels, petechial haemorrhages are much rarer than most people think, and if cardiac inhibition occurs because of suffocation, they are highly unlikely to be present at all.’
‘You are well informed, Ms Maguire.’ A mouthful of vinegar couldn’t have made him any sourer.
‘Thank you. Now, are you sure your patient’s heart couldn’t simply have stopped of its own accord?’
‘Quite positive. He was not a well man, but he had no history of cardiac symptoms whatsoever. His death could not have occurred as a result of natural causes. These fairy-tales you are inventing are ludicrous, a function, I am afraid, of your inexperience. And now I must ask you to leave. I have important work to do.’
So have I, thought Trish. She felt like throttling him, and listing all the cases she had successfully prosecuted and defended. No wonder Deb had lost her temper in this room. Sleepless probably, desperately worried about both her parents, and faced with a man who could listen to what she was saying yet not hear a word of it, she must have felt murderous, too.
Could she have decided to treat her father herself? What if she had remembered how much the antihistamine she’d taken the previous year had helped her, and been determined to get some more to ease her father’s terrible skin condition?
It would have been relatively simple to get a prescription for herself from a doctor who knew nothing about her or her circumstances. Trish thought of the monstrous carbuncle that had once driven her to a practice in Northumberland. She’d been staying with friends who had recommended the surgery. The doctor who saw her had taken one look at her back and prescribed penicillin. She hadn’t had to provide any
identification, only a name, address, and the name of her doctor. Any of them could have been false.
‘You know,’ said Dr Foscutt, speaking in a very clear voice as though Trish were deaf – or very stupid, ‘I don’t wish to be rude, but there is a type and class of woman who, at a certain age, becomes extraordinarily difficult to deal with. Deborah Gibbert was an almost perfect example. You, yourself, are a little young yet for that kind of behaviour.’
You may not wish to be rude, Trish thought, but you’re managing pretty well. Then she remembered the poor young houseman she had savaged, and felt guilty all over again.
‘Mrs Gibbert would not listen to anything anyone said to her. She had several bees in her bonnet and made herself thoroughly unpleasant to everyone here, including the district nurse. When her mother tried to take the blame for her crime, I was ripe for murder myself.’
Trish felt her eyebrows pushing up towards her hairline. From a man who claimed to have such reverence for human life, that remark was pretty rich.
‘Now,’ said Dr Foscutt, almost shouting, ‘I must ask you — once again – to leave my surgery. I have several domiciliary calls to make.’
‘I thought you didn’t do that? Go to people’s homes?’
‘Of course I do. This is a country practice. When patients request a home visit, I make one. And now, if you’ll excuse me, Ms Maguire?’
‘But I understood from Deb Gibbert that—’
‘What I would not do,’ he said, standing up and reaching for his open bag, ‘was drop everything every time poor Helen Whatlam thought up a new anxiety. She used to telephone in a panic of some kind every week. My partners and I have two thousand patients on our books, Ms Maguire. Have you any idea of the responsibility that represents? Or the time it takes to look after them all?’
This seemed to be a speech he had made several times before. Trish didn’t try to respond or to stop it. She just listened.
‘My goodness me, if I took to making house calls to reassure all the hypochondriacs and the chronically ill who are already receiving all the available treatment, I should have no time to see other patients with genuinely treatable complaints. I suggest that you learn a little more about the life of a busy general practitioner before you start criticising us in the way that woman tried to do. Good day to you.’
‘Before I go, there is just one thing on which I’d very much like some instruction from an expert,’ she said, with what she hoped was a shy smile.
He didn’t respond any more than he had to her earlier eagerness, but he didn’t order her out of the room again. She let the smile die since it wasn’t doing her any good.
‘It’s this business of the astemizole that was found in the victim at autopsy.’
Dr Foscutt didn’t move. His face seemed stuck in its tight, affronted pout.
‘I don’t understand how it could have got there. Had you ever prescribed it for him, or for his wife?’
‘I thought you said you had read the trial transcripts, Ms Maguire.’
‘I have.’
‘In that case, you will know that I provided all my case notes for both the Whatlams and thus proved to the court that I had written no prescriptions for astemizole to either of them, or to their daughter. Is that quite clear, Ms Maguire?’
‘Yes, but I’ve been wondering why you didn’t. It’s a very effective antihistamine, isn’t it?’
Dr Foscutt’s face grew redder as she watched and his hands were shaking again.
‘Very. But, Ms Maguire, in a practice like this we have to
watch our budgets. Non-proprietary terfenadine happened to cost less, therefore non-proprietary terfenadine was the drug of choice. Do you understand what I am saying to you?’
‘Yes, I think I can just about manage to grasp it, thank you.’ Trish stood up, stuffing her notebook in her shoulderbag. She detested him as much as he clearly loathed her, but she wasn’t giving in to him. She held out her hand.
‘It was good of you to spare the time to see me, Dr Foscutt, and I hope that when plans for the film are further advanced, you might consider repeating some of this on the screen. I know Malcolm would be pleased.’
Dr Foscutt stood stiffly on his side of the desk. He was not going to take her hand. Trish let it drop to her side.
‘The receptionist will unlock the door for you.’ He did not look at her again, packing his bag with prescription forms and drug bottles. When it was ready, he had to glance up again. He seemed surprised that Trish was still there, although he must have known she hadn’t moved.
‘What I cannot understand,’ he said, hustling her to precede him out of the surgery, ‘is what a respected Member of Parliament like Mr Chaze is doing involved in a sordid affair like this one.’
Trish smiled. ‘Oh, he’s sure Deborah Gibbert is innocent. He’s known her for years, you see.’
The doctor’s expression was a reward in itself. Trish waited by her car until he had roared off in an old Rover, which spluttered and farted up the road in a cloud of dirty exhaust.
Dr Foscutt drove home to an outrageously late lunch. It was true he had domiciliary visits to make, but not until half past three. Lunch was sacred. A man couldn’t give of his best to his patients unless he looked after himself. Luckily Molly was an excellent cook.
He kissed her cheek as he always did when he came home, and counted his blessings. She had aged, like him, but she had never lost the sweetness with which she had started out on married life thirty years ago. She was his calm centre, his certainty, and the one and only reason why he could still cope with the unending, usually unreasonable, demands of his patients and their friends and relations.
Moving in step with her towards the dining room, he thought of the grace with which she had conducted herself throughout a life that couldn’t have been easy. She had taken on his parents’ house, which was much too big for a modern servantless life, and apparently loved it as much as he did; she had given birth to three healthy sons, brought them up with wisdom and kindness, grieved when they left home and always welcomed them back with a smile.
She allowed the morning’s messages to trickle out in bearable quantities as she shook out her napkin and he carved the cold joint. It was pork, his favourite. He had forgotten through the morning’s frustration that they’d had roast pork yesterday. He particularly liked cold crackling with cold
apple sauce. And Molly had made a dish of potatoes and onions in cream to go with it. She was a remarkable woman. He smiled fully for the first time that day as he handed her a plate full of neatly carved slices.
‘Are you having a bad day, dear?’
‘No worse than usual,’ he said briskly, as he poured small glasses of cider for them both. Molly helped herself to salad.
‘You’ve got the red shaky look you have when you’ve been angry. Was it the awful mother of that poor girl with Crohn’s disease again?’
He occasionally forgot how perceptive she could be and nodded to show his gratitude as he told her that for once Mrs Frankel had left him alone. She’d been convinced by some journalist that her daughter’s Crohn’s was the result of the MMR vaccine he’d administered six years ago. He detested the media for what they did to patients with these ludicrously exaggerated scare stories. If everyone who’d written about the autism and the Crohn’s and God knew what else they thought had been caused by MMR looked back at the records to see the much bigger number of children whose infertility, blindness, encephalitis, and brain damage had been caused by complications of measles, mumps and rubella, they’d—
‘Then if not her, who was it, Archie?’ Molly said, luckily breaking in before the fury overtook him completely.
He smiled at her and saw her look reassured. Then he told her a little about the proposed television programme and the impertinent young lawyer who had come along to interrogate him. Her pretences must have been false, he’d decided, when she used the MP’s name.
Molly listened in silence, her forehead disfigured by deep furrows. She sighed as he finished. He saw that she hadn’t eaten anything. He had a piece of meat on the prongs of his fork and was carefully covering it with apple sauce, on to
which he dropped a knife-point’s worth of salt. Too much for his blood pressure probably, but he liked it, and he didn’t have many pleasures.
‘I’ve often wondered why Debbie did it,’ Molly said, staring out of the window towards the black-and-white pattern made by the neighbouring farmer’s Friesians. ‘It seemed so unlike her. She must have done it for Helen’s sake. Debbie always did everything she could to help her mother.’
‘Did you see much of her?’ he asked, in surprise. He couldn’t remember Molly’s ever having volunteered a comment about Deborah Gibbert.
‘When she was here? A little. I used to sit with Ian Whatlam on Saturdays sometimes so that Helen could go to evening mass. And occasionally Debbie would arrive while I was there, and we’d talk. I liked her so much.’
‘You never said.’ He was no longer eating either. He could not remember when he had felt so disturbed.
‘I didn’t want to worry you.’ Molly smiled at him. There seemed to be a kind of courage in her eyes. He wasn’t sure why she needed courage to talk to him, even about something like this. ‘You needed a lot of support over Ian’s death and all through the trial. I tried to give it to you undiluted by any of my own feelings.’
He was not a demonstrative man, but he reached out to pat her hand. She smiled again. He found himself facing the first ever doubt about Deborah Gibbert.
‘Do you mean you don’t think she did it?’
‘Oh, no. I’m sure you’re right that she did it.’ Molly sounded utterly convinced and he began to breathe more easily again. He would trust her judgement anywhere. ‘Besides, there was no one else who could have done it, was there? We both know Helen would never have been strong enough, even if she could have overcome her faith and what it required of her and Ian. No, no, my dear. You mustn’t
worry about that. I just wish I could understand why Debbie didn’t ask for help. We could have intervened if we’d known how bad things were.’
The cold pork was suddenly hard to chew. He did his best, swallowing more cider than usual to get it down. Molly changed the subject by asking about one of his younger patients who had a terrible head injury after a motorcycling accident.
‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ he admitted. He put down his knife and fork, wondering how he was ever going to last until his sixty-fifth birthday. Could he manage five more years of this perpetual juggling with his patients’ needs, finding locums so that he and the other partners could occasionally have a holiday, filling in all the endless forms, battling his patients up the hospital waiting lists, having to read yet more insults to the profession from the government and ill-informed pundits in the press.
While his patients behaved properly, and accepted that he was doing his best for them, he might last out, but if they went on ranting at him, cross-questioning him about his treatments, criticising, demanding things that were out of his power to give them, reading up their illnesses on the Internet, he might break. He might—
‘Try to eat something, my dear.’ Molly’s voice called him back from the edge. ‘You’ll wear yourself out if you don’t.’
He forced himself to focus on her, sitting on his right at his father’s mahogany table, loyal, kind, on his side. His throat opened and the food began to taste good again.
‘There’s nowhere in the area that can take him,’ he said. ‘I’m told that there’s a nursing home near Portsmouth that specialises in cases like his, but I can’t see how to make the budgets stretch to it.’
‘So, what will happen?’
‘His family will have to do their best, with outpatient
treatment where necessary, and the district nurse when she can be spared.’
He caught sight of Molly’s face and added more impatiently, ‘I know what their life will be like, but what’s the alternative? No more hip operations for anyone for a year? Putting off all biopsies in the practice? Something’s got to give.’
‘“It is expedient that one man should die for the people”,’ she quoted, not exactly appositely. ‘I know. I know, Archie. And it can’t be you and your health. Try not to worry too much. Here, you don’t want any more of that, do you? I’ve a nice rice pudding keeping warm. Wouldn’t you rather go straight on to that?’
He felt like kissing her hand as she took his half-eaten food away.
Trish saw the Whatlams’ house from miles away: a square red-brick building with white stone coigns, which should have been pretty but wasn’t. There was a windswept for-sale sign nailed to one of the gateposts and the small front garden was neglected. What must once have been a lawn was now a tattered mess, and a few collapsing roses blew about in the mangled borders.
Presumably few people were prepared to buy a house where a murder had been committed, but Trish was surprised that the efficient Cordelia Whatlam hadn’t taken steps to have this one properly maintained. If the place were ever to find a buyer it would need to look a lot more kempt.
She parked the car in a layby opposite the gates and got out for a closer look. Not far away, she could see a large grey church with a cluster of houses round its skirts. Two of the long ground-floor windows of the house were broken, and all of them were thick with dust. The white paint on the panelled front door was splitting and the brass knocker was greenish-black.
A dog barked. Trish looked round quickly to see a beautifully kept golden retriever dancing along beside an elderly couple. They were dressed in the kind of saggy khaki quilted jackets and toning tweeds that looked as though they’d been deliberately designed to blend in with an English hedge. The man raised his hat and they both murmured, ‘Good afternoon.’
‘Good afternoon.’ Trish produced her frankest smile. Remembering everything she had read about the day before Mr Whatlam died and the neighbours who always walked their golden retriever down the lane, she added, ‘You couldn’t by any chance be Major and Mrs Blakemore, could you?’
‘Have we met somewhere?’ asked the man, a little embarrassed. ‘My memory’s not what it was, I’m afraid. Or my eyesight.’
‘No, we’ve never met.’ Trish held out her hand. ‘Trish Maguire. I’m a … a friend of Deborah Gibbert.’
He shook her hand firmly, then introduced her to his wife, as though she hadn’t been there when Trish gave her name. They, too, shook hands.
‘I’m so glad Debbie still has friends,’ he said, while his wife nodded vigorously.
‘Are you? I understand you overheard her last argument with her father?’
‘That’s right.’ The major turned aside to order the dog to sit. It paid no attention, snuffling at an interesting hole in the bank by the edge of the road. ‘We told the truth in court.’
‘I’m sure you did. It never occurred to me that you wouldn’t have,’ Trish said hurriedly.
‘But we were appalled at the way what we said was used,’ Mrs Blakemore said. ‘Appalled. Poor old Ian Whatlam was one of the most difficult men in the world, always, and of course he got even worse once he was ill. Both Helen and
Debbie had such trouble with him. I wish …’ She turned away. Trish waited, then looked enquiringly at the major.
‘I think my wife wishes we’d known quite how bad things were. We could have helped, d’you see, if we’d understood how desperate Helen was, and Debbie. But they were good women, loyal – wouldn’t want to betray him to his friends. We didn’t know the full story until the trial.’
‘So you don’t think Debbie was guilty of murder?’
‘Good Lord, no. A woman like that? It’s absurd. Whatever she did, she can’t have known it would kill him. I wrote, d’you see, to the Crown Prosecution people to tell them what I thought of the way they’d used our evidence and not allowed us to explain.’
Trish tried to visualise the transcripts. How had Phil Redstone cross-examined these two? She couldn’t remember, so she asked.
Mrs Blakemore had herself under control again. ‘He asked whether we could have been mistaken about the day when we’d heard the argument, and we hadn’t been. We were late bringing Ponto out for his walk because we’d had to wait in for the Aga man, and he hadn’t come until after six, which put back dinner by an hour and a half. There couldn’t be any doubt at all. I said so, and then I was excused. I tried to say what I felt about Debbie, but the lawyers cut me off.’
Such was the woman’s sincerity – and age – that Trish didn’t really mind the way the last word had come out as ‘orf’.
‘Have you seen Debbie in that place?’
‘Yes.’ Trish smiled at them both. ‘It’s not pleasant, but she is holding on. And she has found friends there.’
All over Mrs Blakemore’s face tiny muscles relaxed. She smiled, her lips trembling a little. ‘Helen would be so relieved. It was terrible for her, when she was dying, to know that Debbie might go to prison.’
‘Helen confessed to it herself, d’you see,’ said the major,
looking at his dog. ‘To save Debbie.’
‘I know,’ Trish said.
He nodded and raised his hat again, rocking a little on his feet as though to get them moving once more. His wife took his arm and smiled at Trish. ‘He can’t stand for long. The arthritis isn’t so bad when he’s walking. It’s in his knees, you see.’
‘I quite understand. I’m sorry. It was very good to meet you both. Thank you for being so frank. If you can bear to help me a little more, I’ll walk along beside you. Is there anyone you know of in the village who could have wanted Mr Whatlam dead?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said the major, after a pause for thought. ‘He was a very difficult old man but, d’you see? He hadn’t got out much for years. What with the gout and everything. There wasn’t anyone with any kind of personal grudge against him round here.’
‘Yes, I do see. Thank you. The only other thing I wanted to ask …’
‘Yes?’
‘Was about the doctor. I’ve heard gossip that he once helped one of his patients to die. Could that be right?’
The major looked at his wife. There was new colour under her cheekbones. To Trish’s surprise it turned out to be a sign of anger.
‘That’s malicious nonsense,’ she said, sounding much more forthright. Her husband nodded approvingly. ‘There was an elderly woman with liver cancer who used to live in the village. She needed very large doses of painkillers and the morphine pump she had failed one day. The district nurse called Dr Foscutt, who administered morphine by mouth while a new pump was found. The woman died the next day and one of her relations accused the doctor of killing her.’
‘That seems pretty unfair,’ Trish said. ‘Was there any
reason – a will or anything like that – to make the relation suspicious?’
‘She hadn’t much to leave,’ said the major gruffly. ‘Her pension died with her, and the cottage was rented. But she did leave him a tea-service she’d cherished and he’d once admired. It wasn’t worth much, but it was all she had. And the doctor was all she had, too, because the great-nephew or whoever he was never did anything for her.’