THIRTEEN

The weather had been having its effects on my patients and, in turn, this was having its effects on me. With increasing numbers of cases of heatstroke, especially amongst the elderly and those under two, surgeries were always busy and we were making huge numbers of house calls; something that in itself was becoming a problem. Every day now, by about one in the afternoon, the tarmac of the roads and pavements felt soft as I walked on it; I felt completely drained of energy and my skin greasy and dirty. As I passed women in light summer dresses, men in T-shirts and children in swimming costumes, I (in my suit because I am a doctor) felt even hotter than I actually was. And everyone, it seemed, was upending fizzy drinks bottles, licking mountainous ice-cream cones or, if they were children, slurping Jubbly-Wubblys, the melted bright-red ice water running down their chins and over their hands; I had to make a conscious effort not to stare in naked envy.

The fact that I had arranged to meet Max in the Norbury Hotel for a drink kept me going that afternoon through five house-calls, three of them heat-related. I wasn’t finished until half-four, and then I had an evening clinic which was completely booked and didn’t finish until six-fifty, giving me no chance at all to shower or change before it was time to meet Max. I could only hope that I wasn’t exuding too many unpleasant odours. I reckoned, though, that my news about George Cotterill would drive all olfactory unpleasantness from her mind.

I was not wrong.

‘Oh, my God!’ She was shocked in a way that only she could be; Max was in many ways an innocent, in many others the most knowing person I have ever met. I suspect that she enjoyed – perhaps even revelled in – shock, excitement and incredulity. She delighted in her constant surprise at the variance between the world as she thought it should be and the world as it was, obstinately refusing to behave. ‘Really?’

I nodded glumly. ‘Apparently so. A young couple.’

‘He battered them to death?’

‘With a hammer.’

She winced. ‘Why?’

‘Apparently he saw himself as some sort of moral guardian. He had a strict Christian upbringing mixed with a healthy dose of schizoid paranoia; they lived in the same block of flats as him and weren’t married. He was constantly remonstrating with them – the usual stuff about saving their souls, turning to God, and suchlike. They laughed at him, apparently; laughed once too often, though. He went completely bonkers, ranting about how he was going to save their souls, no matter what they did. He was convicted of their manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment.’

‘He should have been put in a secure mental hospital, surely . . .’

I shrugged. ‘At least fifty per cent of the prison population should be in mental hospitals. There just isn’t the room for them.’

‘How long ago was all this?’

‘Twenty-three years ago.’

‘Where’s he been since then?’

We were enjoying the faded, not to say sepulchral ambience of the lounge bar of the Norbury Hotel; as usual it was only sparsely patronized but the amount of cigarette, pipe and cigar smoke in the atmosphere was enough suggest there was a large conflagration in a not too distant location; there was a definite resemblance to Victorian London as I looked around while sipping a pint of Watney’s Red Barrel bitter, and I half expected Jack the Ripper to jump out from one of the alcoves, perhaps waving a human pancreas, spattering the cream and gold flock wallpaper with gobbets of clotting blood. ‘No one knows,’ I said. Max was sipping Dubonnet and lemonade, a drink I found curiously repellent and sweet, not at all helped by the Day-Glo pink that seemed, in that ghastly smoke-filled atmosphere, to shine with unearthly power. She liked it, though.

‘It’s Dad’s reaction that’s worrying me.’

‘He’ll be upset, you mean?’

‘Upset? He’ll go ballistic. I can see him now, ranting and raving about the incompetence of Masson and the local plod in general. His opinion of the Inspector hasn’t been particularly high, given Masson’s predilection for arresting him at every available opportunity, so this is just going to be pouring petrol on the bonfire.’

‘But they do seem to have reasonable cause for at least suspecting him.’

I drained my pint; there was always something about Watney’s Red that seemed acidic; it left a peculiar fuzzy feel to my teeth as if, like rhubarb, it was dissolving them. ‘That won’t matter,’ I assured her. ‘Dad spent forty years practising medicine as an art, not a science. He worked by premonition and he thought he had a consummate talent, no matter what the laboratory findings told him. He applies the same principles to life; if he thinks George is innocent, no amount of evidence to the contrary is going to persuade him otherwise. George could have been found covered from head to foot in human blood, and with entrails draped over his shoulders whilst gibbering about his lust for pagan murder, and my good pater would suspect a frame-up. You mark my words.’

I got up from the table and made ready to trudge through the Stygian atmosphere to the bar for refills, trying to keep at bay the nagging fear that, given the gloom, I would not be able to find Max on my return journey.

It was as I predicted, except that maybe Dad’s reaction was even more violent than I expected.

‘That man is a disgrace to his uniform,’ he declared.

‘He doesn’t wear a uniform, Dad . . .’

‘Don’t be an imbecile, Lance. You know exactly what I mean. For God’s sake, I don’t expect members of Her Majesty’s Constabulary to be endowed with the intellectual capacity of a genius, but I do at least hope that they aren’t all gibbering idiots and buffoons.’

It was the middle of a Friday and I had dropped in to see him during the course of my midday home visits. ‘Dad . . .’

‘Why on earth would someone as harmless as George Cotterill do something like that?’ I hadn’t yet told him what I knew about George’s previous misdemeanours, but I wasn’t allowed a chance to do it. ‘And how strong must the killer have been? George is in his sixties, for goodness’ sake.’

‘He’s quite fit and strong for his age.’

‘Pshaw!’ This strange syllable – perhaps a relic of a lost, ancient tongue, or perhaps an imitation of a steam engine with the collywobbles – served to let me know that my progenitor had little truck with my arguments. He carried on what he was doing, which was searching through his large, unwieldy and over-ornate wardrobe. He had deposited various items of clothing – socks (all grey), casual shirts in various strikingly offensive colours, slacks (including a pair that were pale blue and, if I am totally honest, painful on the optic nerve) and woollen pullovers.

‘What are you doing? Is there a jumble sale?’

He stopped what he was doing – folding a vaguely grey pair of underpants that looked as though they had seen service on the Eastern Front during the Great War – and stared at me. ‘I’m packing,’ he replied coldly.

‘What for?’ For some reason I immediately leapt to the conclusion that he was off to hospital for an operation.

‘Ada and I are going to Brighton for the weekend,’ he said. He was continuing to stare at me but I detected a degree of defensiveness in his words, as if he anticipated an adverse reaction to this announcement. In fact I was too stunned to say anything immediately, other than a slightly dazed, ‘Oh.’

He resumed his packing, searching under the bed for a few moments, in the end almost having to disappear completely under it. When he wriggled back out, he began to cough and was covered in dust, duck feathers and a small but extremely active spider. He produced an ancient brown suitcase that, with no little effort, he lifted on to the bed. When opened, I saw that it contained women’s clothing, all carefully and reverentially folded. I knew at once what they were and in that instant, he saw me looking, saw that I knew, and quickly shut it again. There was an unmistakeable sense of embarrassment in the air of that room then, one that was reflected in the way that he kept his head low and muttered, ‘I’ll finish this later.’

‘Dad . . .’

It was far from cold in his bedroom, but the ghost of my mother – my mother whom for some reason we rarely mentioned, perhaps because we had both loved her too much – was there with us, and even the most loved and loving of ghosts brings with it a chill. He asked so quickly that he interrupted me, ‘What is it, Lance?’

I hesitated, thought about saying nothing, then said as gently as I could, ‘There’s no problem, you know, Dad.’

I was seeking to reassure him, but I think I not only failed, I made things worse; certainly for me, if not for him; being my dad, though, he merely frowned, then said a touch too loudly, ‘What on earth are you talking about, Lance? You’re lapsing into feeble-mindedness again.’

I smiled. ‘You’re right. I know.’

He nodded assertively. ‘I really don’t understand it. Most of the time you seem to be quite bright, and then suddenly you stumble into meaningless lunacy. It’s clearly not inherited; I blame the television.’

I loved him so much then that I felt tears hot in my eyes. He was thinking exactly what I was thinking – that Mum wouldn’t mind him having a bit of female company in his life now that she was so long gone, that she had loved him too much to begrudge him that and that I should have kept my mouth shut. ‘You’re probably right, Dad.’ I had four more visits to make before evening surgery and used the excuse of these now to make my exit. ‘Where are you staying in Brighton?’ I asked.

‘At the Grand,’ was the reply, his tone suggesting that the notion of staying anywhere else was clearly yet another sign of my loopiness. ‘We’re due there at seven.’

‘And you’re back . . .?’

‘Sunday afternoon. We might stop off for lunch on the way, perhaps in Hurstpierpoint, or somewhere.’

‘Well, have a nice time.’

He smiled. ‘Thank you, Lance. I think I will.’

With which slightly gnomic remark, we parted.