‘The doctor won’t be able to see you until next week,’ said the receptionist, her voice oozing satisfaction.
‘I’m not a patient,’ Trish said crisply into the phone, glad that the woman couldn’t see her face. ‘I’m researching the background to a film about Deborah Gibbert’s case. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Of course. But … Could you hold on a moment?’ Trish waited, hearing several other phones ringing and a blurry mixture of voices, punctuated by a child’s frightened wailing. When the receptionist picked up the phone again, she sounded breathless. ‘The doctor cannot possibly spare the time to talk to you.’
Thinking about a country GP in late middle age, Trish took a gamble on his likely political affiliations. ‘Could you tell him that I’m calling on behalf of Malcolm Chaze, the MP, who is particularly interested in the case and planning to discuss all its implications on screen in due course?’
‘The doctor’s busy with a patient. He’s already said he can’t help you. I can’t interrupt him again.’
‘Please try once more, and tell him about Malcolm Chaze. He’s already written the first of a series of articles on the subject, you know. It should be coming out any day now.’
Another, longer, pause ended with the receptionist panting and irritable. ‘Dr Foscutt is most fearfully busy, but he has authorised me to say that if you come here later on this
morning, he’ll try to squeeze you some time at the end of surgery. Be here by twelve.’
That didn’t leave much time to drive into the wilds of Norfolk, but there weren’t many days when Trish had neither court nor chambers commitments, so she agreed. She might have to sit up half the night working on her trial papers to make up for the trip, but she had to find out what the doctor knew and whether he was as ghastly as Deb had claimed.
Picking her way with difficulty through the East End towards the M11 twenty minutes later, she wished she had never set out. But once she had reached the motorway and could put her foot down, it wasn’t so bad. She’d always loathed Norfolk, cold, flat, featureless and associated in her mind with painful memories of an old boyfriend, but she did like fast driving.
Accustomed in childhood to the cosiness of Buckinghamshire, with its beech woods and beautiful seventeenth-century red brick, Trish had to work to appreciate the huge skies and bleached emptiness of East Anglia.
The doctor’s village turned out to have a kind of bleak charm, with neat white cottages and a few bigger houses built of grey flint and stone. Parking was easy, but it amused Trish to find that the surgery shared a car park with the local pub.
The waiting room was still full. It was clear she wasn’t going to get in to see Dr Foscutt for some time. As she sat down and opened her newspaper, the mainly elderly patients in the waiting room resumed the conversations they had broken off to stare at her. One woman, who had a great bruise spreading up over one side of her face, confided to her neighbour that she just didn’t know what she’d do if she fell again when the Meals-on-Wheels lady wasn’t due for more than twenty-four hours. She just couldn’t get up on her own any more and there wasn’t anyone else to help. The neighbour
was sympathetic but wanted to talk about the time she’d had to wait six hours for the hospital transport service to get her home after the last X-ray. But that wasn’t nearly as long as the first woman had had to wait when she’d gone in for her biopsy and some machine or other wasn’t working so they’d wanted to send her straight home without doing the operation at all.
Their patience was astonishing, and their stoicism. Trish had heard doctors in London complaining of the hordes of ‘worried well’ who clogged their surgeries, along with people surprised by an excess of earwax or uncomfortable with a heavy cold. Such people clearly didn’t bother Dr Foscutt.
One woman, who looked about seventy and was describing
sotto voce
how embarrassing she had found her last barium meal, suddenly blushed. Trish realised she had been staring and raised her newspaper to give the woman some privacy.
The voices became little more than a distant buzz as Trish read the law reports. She was vaguely aware of phones ringing and patients moving around as she read. Leafing back through the paper, she came to the opinion page, opposite the letters, and saw Malcolm Chaze’s face, looking out at her.
Darkly glamorous, but serious too, the portrait headed a diatribe about drugs in prison. He wrote with passionate anger, usually balanced by clear argument. His last three paragraphs went over the top, but by then he had found a way to introduce Deb:
It is a shocking system that locks up for life an innocent woman like Deborah Gibbert but cannot control the evil of illegal drugs. For the past six months, Mrs Gibbert, a devoted wife and mother, has been sharing a cell with a heroin addict. Somehow the young addict got hold of enough of the drug for a dangerous overdose. Taken to hospital for treatment, she may not recover.
How could this happen in a place where she was meant to be guarded twenty-four hours a day? Someone in that prison must know who supplied the heroin. But no one will talk. Without witnesses, there is no hope of identifying, let alone convicting, the dealer.
Something has gone fatally wrong in society and it is up to all of us to put it right. If the law has to be changed and some cherished freedoms curtailed to rid our land of this evil, then so be it. I for one will work for the rest of my days to …
‘Ms Maguire?’ The receptionist was standing in front of Trish, her face tight with impatience.
‘Sorry,’ Trish said, dropping the paper in her lap.
‘Dr Foscutt can see you now. Please don’t keep him too long. He’s got a heavy list this afternoon, and then there’s evening surgery.’
‘I’ll do my best to be quick.’ Trish got up as she was folding up her paper and stuffed it into the briefcase she was holding open against her bent knee.
Dr Foscutt did not impress her. Slight, but very erect in his green tweed suit, he was a couple of inches shorter than she, and he clearly resented it. In fact, Trish thought, he looked as though he might resent quite a lot. He waved her to a chair on the far side of his desk.
She sat down, looking straight into his chilly grey-green eyes, and repeated her introductory spiel.
‘I know Ian Whatlam’s death took place four years ago,’ she finished, ‘but I’m sure you haven’t forgotten it.’
The doctor fiddled with his spectacles, tapping them on his blotter, opening them and squinting at the lenses. He looked away from Trish, feeling in all his pockets, apparently searching for a special cloth to polish and repolish the glass.
‘It was a dreadful time,’ he said, as he put on the spectacles,
settling his shoulders in a series of flurrying movements. ‘I do not know when I have been more disturbed by anything. Of course I have not forgotten.’
Trish opened her mouth to ask a helpful question, but he didn’t need help.
‘I agreed to see you this morning because it is of crucial importance to show the public that assisted deaths are wholly unforgivable.’ His declamatory style must have come from long practice. ‘If your television programme is designed to do the opposite, I shall—’
‘It isn’t.’
He looked surprised. ‘Have you not come here to persuade me that Deborah Gibbert was justified in what she did because it released her father from intolerable pain?’
Intrigued, Trish shook her head and watched the muscles under the thin skin of his face twitch and tighten. ‘What on earth would be the point?’ she said. ‘Deb’s been convicted of murder and is in prison. There’s no question of getting her off on some kind of mercy-killing excuse at this stage.’
‘Then what
are
you trying to do, Ms Maguire?’ The question was so straightforward that Trish was almost prepared to forgive him for his speechifying.
‘Show that she didn’t kill him,’ she said, letting herself frown, as though puzzled by his mistake. ‘And that all the facts which were given in evidence in court could be construed in at least two quite different ways.’
Dr Foscutt raised his eyes to the ceiling and sighed with all the gustiness of a pantechnicon letting out its air brakes. Trish hoped he’d be prepared to reproduce it on camera.
‘And I am here now to establish exactly what was wrong with her father and how you treated him,’ she went on, hoping she looked unthreatening. ‘And his wife, of course.’
‘Good gracious me! You cannot possibly expect me to disclose patient records to you, a complete stranger.’
‘You disclosed them to the court.’
‘That was entirely different.’
‘I see. Why did you suppose I wanted to talk about assisted deaths?’ Trish asked, watching as the spectacles hit the blotter again, bounced up and down in his hand like a miniature pogo stick.
‘My receptionist told me that’s what you wanted.’
‘I don’t—’
‘And, in any case, it was Deborah Gibbert’s only possible defence, even though it is no defence either in law or in morality. I wanted to make that plain to you. Do you understand, Ms Maguire?’
‘I understand what you’re telling me, but it’s not quite accurate.’ Trish was well used to explaining the same point over and over to lay clients, so she was able to keep her voice free of both irritability and excessive patience. ‘Deb’s defence was that she had neither suffocated her father nor given him an overdose of antihistamines.’
‘That’s as ludicrous now as it was then,’ he said, fast and angrily. ‘The autopsy proved that someone had done just that, and there was no one else in the house who was physically, let alone emotionally, capable of it.’
‘Except her mother.’
Dr Foscutt’s face reddened and his narrow upper lip began to quiver. Trish quite expected his spectacles to snap between his tightening fingers.
‘Helen Whatlam required a stick to walk – and balance – with. Think about that, Ms Maguire, if you can think about anything beyond your extraordinary enthusiasm for a callous killer like Deborah Gibbert.’
Trish thought of her face as a plaster mask and her feelings as nasty little rodents threatening to gnaw holes in it and give him a glimpse of her real loathing.
‘I don’t suppose you have ever tried to put an unconscious
man’s head in a polythene bag, have you, Ms Maguire?’ Foscutt was sneering, so the mask must have been thick enough to contain her feelings.
‘No.’
‘Well, neither have I, but I can assure you it would take two hands.’
‘Perhaps she leaned against the wall for balance.’
‘And perhaps the fairies did it,’ he said surprisingly. He hadn’t appeared to have a sense of humour. ‘Ms Maguire, this is a shocking waste of my time and no doubt of yours too. You must know perfectly well that if Helen Whatlam had committed the crime, her fingerprints would have been on the polythene bag.’
‘Yes, but she said she used a—’
‘Please do not waste my time with this kind of nonsense.’ Dr Foscutt put both hands on the edge of his desk, as though to push himself to his feet.
‘Have you never been tempted to help a suffering patient on his – or her – way, Dr Foscutt?’ Trish asked quickly. There was something in the man that worried her – and, judging by his body language, it worried him too. He was so tense she felt he would twang if she plucked him.
She watched as he coughed and put on his spectacles again. His hands lay on the pristine blotter in front of her. They were not shaking any more, but the joints were white. Trish could see him working to make himself relax. His fingers stretched, and his chest expanded as his lungs pumped in and out. His lips moved as he sucked them. At last he was ready to pronounce.
‘Ms Maguire, I do not know what gossip you may think you have picked up.’
Aha! thought Trish, but she waited without prodding.
‘But I can assure you that I have never taken – nor would I ever take – part in any kind of euthanasia. You must be as
well aware of the law as I: no doctor may assist his patient to die, but every doctor may give pain relief to a dying patient, even though he knows that the analgesia will also work to shorten the period of dying.’
‘Yes,’ Trish said, even more interested. Gossip, she thought, what gossip? ‘Naturally I know that. Was Mr Whatlam being given pain relief?’
‘My goodness me!’ The doctor’s lips spread tightly against his teeth, as though he was trying to smile without ever having known how that should feel. ‘How many times must I reiterate that I will not reveal details of a patient’s treatment?’
‘Very well. Then what can you tell me about Deborah Gibbert’s last visit to the surgery?’
‘She was a difficult woman,’ he said, leaning back in his chair and taking off his glasses again. He folded them and tapped one end on the blotter. This time the tapping was relatively slow, no more than one gentle knock every five seconds.
How odd that he should be relaxing, Trish thought. Why was Deb’s last visit so much less worrying than his views on euthanasia? From her account in the prison, it had been dreadful. Trish smiled sweetly and waited.
‘Unlike her mother, who was a delightful woman and very patient with her husband, Mrs Gibbert had no understanding whatsoever of the limitations imposed on the medical profession.’
So perhaps that was why you wanted Deb to be the killer and not her mother, Trish thought. Aloud she said, ‘And so what did she do – Deb, I mean – on that last visit here?’
‘She harangued me, in front of a waiting room full of patients, if you can believe it.’ Dr Foscutt’s voice had begun to shake again. He pursed his lips, which made him look like an elderly geisha before she’d put on her makeup. ‘She told me that if a dog were in the pain her father was forced to
endure, its carers would be hauled into court by the RSPCA.’
‘And you took that, did you, as a plea to shorten his life?’