10

I brushed the remnants of pastry crumbs off my trousers, swung the truck door open and jumped down to the road. I had just troughed down a steak and cheese pie, and succeeded in both burning the roof of my mouth and getting indigestion. Served me right for being in such a rush. I glanced sideways at the gelatinous-looking slab of custard square that sat on the passenger seat and thought better of it.

The morning hadn’t been a complete and utter write-off. I had tried to contact the remainder of Dora McGann’s bridge group, but none was home. Chances were they were out together, enjoying lunch, drinking too much sherry and talking about Gaby and the van. The exact thing I didn’t want them doing. Witness by committee was not the best. But during the wait until I could see Dr Arnold, I’d followed up on Gaby’s script at the pharmacy in Gore that had dispensed it. I thought it odd that she’d have her family doctor in Mataura and then travel over to Gore to have scripts filled when there was a pharmacy here. Convenience would have been my choice, but I suppose everyone had their favourites. My chat had been most productive and had only strengthened my apprehensions about Gaby’s death. The Gore pharmacy had never dispensed sleeping tablets for her before this, nor had she been given any medicines that would suggest a problem with depression. The staff had been stunned at the news of Gaby’s death and had been very keen to help in any way possible – no quoting law at me there. Unfortunately, no one could tell me who had picked up the Hypnovel script, although they were unanimous it wasn’t Gaby. Definitely wasn’t Lockie either, but they were pretty sure it was a man. They had assumed it was a brother, or one of Lockie’s relatives.

I’d have given anything for some video tape, but here at the back of nowhere surveillance cameras weren’t high on anyone’s must-have list. Bugger it. I really wanted to know who’d gone in and collected that script.

I glanced once more at my watch. One o’clock.

‘Here we go again.’

As I strode across the road to the medical centre, I hoped like hell I wouldn’t meet up with Dr Walden in the waiting room. Mercifully, he was elsewhere.

‘Sam, go straight through,’ Francine said as I walked into the reception area. ‘Dr Arnold’s expecting you.’

‘But I didn’t make an appointment.’

‘Saw the truck parked across the road. Did you enjoy the pie, by the way?’

‘It was pretty damned average, but it filled a gap.’

‘You should have come in and eaten in the staffroom. We wouldn’t have minded. We’d have even given you a cuppa.’

It was lovely of her to say, but the thought of trying to eat with Dr Walden staring at my breasts would have given me worse indigestion than I already had. Either that, or he’d have worn the pie. ‘Maybe next time,’ I said.

‘You know where to go,’ Francine said, and she pointed her pen towards the rooms. I wandered down the hallway, past Creep-Face’s closed door.

‘Hello,’ I said as I pushed open the door to Dr Arnold’s room. ‘Anybody home?’

‘Sam, always a pleasure. Come in.’

Ranjit Arnold was a fifty-something of obvious Indian extraction. I was dying to know how the hell he managed to get a surname like Arnold, but was far too well brought up to ask. He carried an air of quiet strength and serenity normally reserved for royalty or the clergy. He was also a jovial character who could put anyone at ease; you could see humour dance a jig in the creases around his eyes as he spoke. His easy manner and caring nature had endeared him very quickly to a community normally wary of anyone of foreign descent. Word of mouth from rapt patients had meant his client list filled up quickly. He sure as hell got my tick of approval.

‘Ranjit, how are you?’

‘Damned fine, damned fine. Patients keep coming and paying their money, despite my not being able to cure them; children still think I’m God with a lollipop; and occasionally I get to play surgeon and stitch something up. What more could a guy ask for?’ Mischief was painted all over his face. ‘How are you, Sam? Go on, give me something exciting to do. Nasty skin rash? Growing an extra limb somewhere? Something I can get the scalpels out for? Please, please.’ He flexed his fingers in mock anticipation.

‘Ahhh, hate to disappoint you.’ Then I put on my best serious voice and assumed my best constabulary pose. ‘I’m afraid I’m here on official business today, Dr Arnold. I would like you to assist me in my investigations.’

‘Ah, that serious, is it?’

‘Well, actually it is,’ I said quietly, back in sombre mood. ‘Have you caught up with Gaby Knowes’ death?’

‘Francine mentioned it when I came in. Suicide, she said.’

‘That’s what it seems but, to be honest, I have my doubts.’ As well as valuing his medical advice, I valued Dr Arnold’s opinions as a man. He was a good sounding board for all manner of complaints, physical and emotional.

‘How so?’ he asked.

I shrugged.

‘Nothing concrete I can put my finger on, just lots of things that don’t quite add up. Call it a gut feeling.’

‘Doesn’t hurt to listen to that gut, my girl,’ he said, monstrous brows knitted together. ‘What is it I can help you with?’

I fossicked around in my satchel and produced a copy of the prescription for Hypnovel. The pharmacist, God bless her, had been very helpful.

‘I was wanting to ask you about the script Gaby had for Hypnovel.’

‘I think Tony was her GP. Have you spoken to him?’

‘Dr Walden was not particularly forthcoming. In fact, he was quite obsessed with quoting the Privacy Act at me.’ I didn’t really like to play tattle-tales, but after this morning’s episode: stuff him. ‘I didn’t learn anything that could help with the investigation.’

‘Well, Sam, to be fair, we do have to tread very carefully around privacy issues, and if he couldn’t help you, then I really can’t undermine him and give you personal information about Mrs Knowes.’

‘I realise that,’ I said quickly, ‘and I’d never put you in that position. No, I just wanted to ask you about the script you wrote her for Hypnovel.’

‘Pardon?’

A puzzled frown crossed his face, so I passed over the copy I’d acquired from the pharmacy. He examined it closely, and then tapped it with his finger.

‘Well, Sam, you’ve found your smoking gun,’ he said, grim. ‘I didn’t write this script.’

‘What? That’s your letterhead, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it looks like it, but I didn’t write this script. I’ve never had a consultation with Mrs Knowes. This script is a forgery.’

‘Shit,’ I said, and then clapped my hand over my mouth. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to swear. That just slipped out.’

‘That’s OK. Quite OK, considering. See, that’s not my signature or writing.’ He cocked his head to the side to peer at it from a different perspective. ‘It’s kind of like it, so I can see how you’d be fooled, but it’s definitely not mine.’

‘Can you do me a comparison?’ I asked, getting up to move around behind him.

He pulled out a blank piece of paper, copied out the details of the script and then signed it. With the two documents side by side, we compared the writing. Presented like this, Gaby’s prescription was clearly not from the same hand.

‘Surely the pharmacy should have noticed the difference,’ I said. ‘They see your writing every day. They should have picked this up.’

I must have sounded a tad accusing, as he looked up at me sharply.

‘Not necessarily. The last thing they’d expect is a forged script, and it is on my script pad, after all.’ He tapped on the document. ‘Superficially, it could appear to be mine.’

‘Have you had any pads go missing recently?’ I asked.

‘No, no break-ins or anything odd.’

‘How would someone get hold of one of your script forms then?’

We sat in silence for a moment and pondered the paper in front of us. Then I saw it.

‘It’s got a serial number. Do all your scripts have serial numbers?’

‘Yes, they come printed on the pad, see.’ He reached into a drawer and pulled out an unused pad. In the bottom corner of each page, printed in red, were consecutive serial numbers.

‘Do you record the serial number for each script you write?’

He laughed. ‘No, firstly, it has never occurred to me to do that. And, secondly, who has the time?’

I smiled back at him. True, there was enough paperwork in this world without creating more for yourself on the off chance someone would play forger.

‘Who else has access to things like prescription pads?’ I asked.

‘Well, any of the staff, really. I don’t lock them away. But I don’t believe any of them would do that. You know them, they’re good people.’

He was right there. I couldn’t imagine Francine, Chrissie or any of them forging a script for anything, let alone sleeping tablets to kill someone off. Perhaps Gaby could have done this, after all? No, she’d have waited around to pick up the script if she’d gone to that much trouble to bump herself off. And the pharmacy staff had said it was a guy who picked it up. It was definitely the killer’s work. But how?

‘How would I do it?’ I thought out loud.

‘Pardon?’ Ranjit asked.

‘How would I forge a script, and have enough faith in it to give it to a pharmacy that sees the doctor’s writing pretty often? That was pretty ballsy.’

‘Yes, you’d think they’d go somewhere miles away to have it filled.’

‘Come to think of it, they must have done enough research into Gaby to know that her regular pharmacy was in Gore. It was dispensed at Cleveland’s, by the way; and not the most convenient one near by in Mataura. She’d used that one too, I checked this morning, but she had a preference for Gore, for whatever reason.’ My mind was racing through the possibilities. ‘Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe the killer thought the forged script was more likely to be detected at the Mataura Pharmacy so tried Gore, as it was far enough away to improve the odds, but not so far off the beaten track to arouse suspicion. Other than Gore, the nearest pharmacy would be where? Wyndham, or Invercargill? That’s forty minutes away. They must be local.’

We looked at each other, and I shuddered. The thought of the town harbouring a murderer was unnerving. The area hadn’t seen a murder for – well, I couldn’t recall any. It was a pretty bloody safe place to live, until now.

‘Scanned,’ I said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Scanned. You get hold of a genuine script, scan it into your computer, and not only have you got a nice sample of the doctor’s writing and a signature; delete out the writing and you’ve got a blank script. Print it off, write what you want, away you go.’

‘Do you always do that?’

‘Do what?’ I asked.

‘Come up with stuff like that out of left field? We were talking about other towns.’

‘It’s a gift,’ I said, and laughed. ‘Years of cryptic crosswords and associated lateral thinking. According to my flatmate, you do get used to it.’

‘Lucky flatmate. You’re probably right, though. With the technology around, it doesn’t sound that difficult. In fact, most households would probably have a scanner nowadays. I’ve had one for two years. Haven’t plugged it in yet, but I’ve got one.’

Couldn’t help but smile at that one.

‘So, if they did that,’ I said, straightening up and pacing the short distance across the room, words drummed out with each measured step, ‘they had to get a script through normal means to copy. If they scanned an existing script, they would have scanned and repeated the serial number. We know the serial number of the forgery, so if they were stupid enough to present the original script to the pharmacy, and we can get them to search through the serial numbers, they might find a match. If they are really, truly stupid, they will have used their name and address and voilà.’

I didn’t believe for a second that anyone who had gone to that amount of trouble would be so thick, but hey, you never knew. Stranger things had happened. We had all laughed at reports of hapless crooks who’d left wallets behind at the scene of the crime, or balaclavas with their names carefully sewn in by Mummy.

‘It’s worth a try. Never underestimate basic stupidity,’ Ranjit said. Then he peered intently at the two pieces of paper again. ‘If you were going to scan it, a script for, say, athlete’s foot cream or ABT tablets would do.’

‘ABT tablets?’

‘Any Bloody Thing,’ he said.

I laughed. ‘That original script would have been handled by everyone under the sun, but we might get a useful print from it. I’ll have to fingerprint all the pharmacy staff, and quick before any possible traces are obliterated. Oh, they’re gonna love that.’

‘Just one little thing,’ Ranjit said, and looked up at me.

I came back over beside him, and looked at the spot his finger tapped on the forged script.

‘Whoever wrote this knows their drugs – they’ve stated the strength. Anyone could get the name right, but they’d have to know this drug specifically to know the strength. Hell, half the time, I don’t even write the strength down on something like this – there is only one tablet available.’

The image of Dr Walden immediately leaped into my head. I shook it. He had been fairly hostile during my inquiries and he was definitely a sleaze, but that hardly qualified him as a murderer. It did bring him up on my radar though.

‘Thanks, Ranjit,’ I said, picking up the script copy and the comparison he had written. ‘This certainly changes things. Now we have a strong suspicion of foul play, it’s time to call in the heavies.’

‘The heavies?’

‘Yes, this is a murder inquiry now. We’ll be inundated with police and CIB. The circus is coming to town.’