Troubled Blood

“Yes!” said Irene. “See—Jan, don’t look like that, honestly—I took a call from a nursing home, while she was out on a house call! They called the practice to confirm she’d be in next day…” and she mouthed the next few words, “for an abortion!”

“They told you what procedure she was going in for, over the phone?” asked Robin.

For a moment, Irene looked rather confused.

“They—well, no—actually, I—well, I’m not proud of it, but I called the clinic back. Just nosy. You do that kind of thing when you’re young, don’t you?”

Robin hoped her reciprocal smile looked sincerer than Irene’s.

“When was this, Mrs. Hickson, can you remember?” Strike asked.

“Not long before she disappeared. Four weeks? Something like that?”

“Before or after the anonymous notes?”

“I don’t—after, I think,” said Irene. “Or was it? I can’t remember…”

“Did you talk to anyone else about the appointment?”

“Only Jan, and she told me off. Didn’t you, Jan?”

“I know you didn’t mean any ’arm,” muttered Janice, “but patient confidentiality—”

“Margot wasn’t our patient. It’s a different thing.”

“And you didn’t tell the police about this?” Strike asked her.

“No,” said Irene, “because I—well, I shouldn’t’ve known, should I? Anyway, how could it have anything to do with her disappearing?”

“Apart from Mrs. Beattie, did you tell anyone else about it?”

“No,” said Irene defensively, “because—I mean, I wouldn’t have told anyone else—you kept your mouth shut, working at a doctor’s surgery. I could’ve told all kinds of people’s secrets, couldn’t I? Being a receptionist, I saw files, but of course you didn’t say anything, I knew how to keep secrets, it was part of the job…”

Expressionless, Strike wrote “protesting too much” in his notebook.

“I’ve got another question, Mrs. Hickson, and it might be a sensitive one,” Strike said, looking up again. “I heard you and Margot had a disagreement at the Christmas party.”

“Oh,” said Irene, her face falling. “That. Yes, well—”

There was a slight pause.

“I was cross about what she’d done to Kevin. Jan’s son. Remember, Jan?”

Janice looked confused.

“Come on, Jan, you do,” said Irene, tapping Janice’s arm again. “When she took him into her consulting room and blah blah blah.”

“Oh,” said Janice. For a moment, Robin had the distinct impression that Janice was truly cross with her friend this time. “But—”

“You remember,” said Irene, glaring at her.

“I… yeah,” said Janice. “Yeah, I was angry about that, all right.”

“Jan had kept him off school,” Irene told Strike. “Hadn’t you, Jan? How old was he, six? And then—”

“What exactly happened?” Strike asked Janice.

“Kev had a tummy ache,” said Janice. “Well, schoolitis, really. My neighbor ’oo sometimes looked after ’im wasn’t well—”

“Basically,’ interrupted Irene, “Jan brought Kevin to work and—”

“Could Mrs. Beattie tell the story?” Strike asked.

“Oh—yes, of course!” said Irene. She put her hand back on her abdomen again and stroked it, with a long-suffering air.

“Your usual childminder was ill?” Strike prompted Janice.

“Yeah, but I was s’posed to be at work, so I took Kev wiv me to the practice and give ’im a coloring book. Then I ’ad to change a lady’s dressing in the back room, so I put Kev in the waiting room. Irene and Gloria were keeping an eye on him for me. But then Margot—well, she took ’im into her consulting room and examined ’im, stripped ’im off to the waist and everything. She knew ’e was my son an’ she knew why ’e was there, but she took it upon herself… I was angry, I can’t lie,” said Janice quietly. ‘We ’ad words. I said, ‘All you ’ad to do was wait until I’d seen the patient and I’d’ve come in wiv ’im while you looked at him.’

“And I’ve got to say, when I put it to her straight, she backed down right away and apologized. No,” Janice said, because Irene had puffed herself up, “she did, Irene, she apologized, said I was quite right, she shouldn’t have seen him without me, but ’e’d been holding his tummy and she acted on instinct. It wasn’t badly intentioned. She just, sometimes—”

“—put people’s backs up, that’s what I’m saying,” said Irene. “Thought she was above everyone else, she knew best—”

“—rushed in, I was going to say. But she were a good doctor,” said Janice, with quiet firmness. “You ’ear it all, when you’re in people’s ’ouses, you ’ear what the patients think of them, and Margot was well liked. She took time. She was kind—she was, Irene, I know she got on your wick, but that’s what the patients—”

“Oh, well, maybe,” said Irene, with an if-you-say-so inflection. “But she didn’t have much competition at St. John’s, did she?”

“Were Dr. Gupta and Dr. Brenner unpopular?” Strike asked.

“Dr. Gupta was lovely,” said Janice. “A very good doctor, although some patients didn’t want to see a brown man, and that’s the truth. But Brenner was an ’ard man to like. It was only after he died that I understood why he might’ve—”

Irene gave a huge gasp and then began, unexpectedly, to laugh.

“Tell them what you collect, Janice. Go on!” She turned to Strike and Robin. “If this isn’t the creepiest, most morbid—”

“I don’t collect ’em,” said Janice, who had turned pink. “They’re just something I like to save—”

“Obituaries! What d’you think of that? The rest of us collect china or snow globes, blah blah blah, but Janice collects—”

“It isn’t a collection,” repeated Janice, still pink-faced. “All it is—” She addressed Robin with a trace of appeal. “My mum couldn’t read—”

“Imagine,” said Irene complacently, stroking her stomach. Janice faltered for a moment, then said,

“—yeah, so… Dad wasn’t bothered about books, but ’e used to bring the paper ’ome, and that’s ’ow I learned to read. I used to cut out the best stories. ’Uman interest, I s’pose you’d call them. I’ve never been that interested in fiction. I can’t see the point, things somebody’s made up.”

“Oh, I love a good novel,” breathed Irene, still rubbing her stomach.

“Anyway… I dunno… when you read an obituary, you find out ’oo people’ve really been, don’t you? If it’s someone I know, or I nursed, I keep ’em because, I dunno, I felt like somebody should. You get your life written up in the paper—it’s an achievement, isn’t it?”

“Not if you’re Dennis Creed, it isn’t,” said Irene. Looking as though she’d said something very clever she reached forwards to take another biscuit, and a deafening fart ripped through the room.

Irene turned scarlet. Robin thought for one horrible moment that Strike was going to laugh, so she said loudly to Janice,

“Did you keep Dr. Brenner’s obituary?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Janice, who seemed completely unperturbed by the loud noise that had just emanated from Irene. Perhaps she was used to far worse, as a nurse. “An’ it explained a lot.”

“In what way?” asked Robin, determinedly not looking at either Strike or Irene.

“’E’d been into Bergen-Belsen, one of the first medical men in there.”

“God,” said Robin, shocked.

“I know,” said Janice. “’E never talked about it. I’d never ’ave known, if I ’adn’t read it in the paper. What ’e must have seen… mounds of bodies, dead kids… I read a library book about it. Dreadful. Maybe that’s why ’e was the way ’e was, I dunno. I felt sorry, when I read it. I ’adn’t seen ’im in years by the time ’e died. Someone showed me the obituary, knowing I’d been at St. John’s, and I kept it as a record of him. You could forgive Brenner a lot, once you saw what ’e’d witnessed, what ’e’d been through… but that’s true of everyone, really, innit? Once you know, ev’rything’s explained. It’s a shame you often don’t know until it’s too late to—you all right, love?” she said to Irene.

In the wake of the fart, Robin suspected that Irene had decided the only dignified cover-up was to emphasize that she was unwell.

“D’you know, I think it’s stress,” she said, her hand down the waist-band of her trousers. “It always flares up when I’m… sorry,” she said with dignity to Strike and Robin, “but I’m afraid I don’t think I…”

“Of course,” said Strike, closing his notebook. “I think we’ve asked everything we came for, anyway. Unless there’s anything else,” he asked the two women, “that you’ve remembered that seems odd, in retrospect, or out of place?”

“We’ve fort, ’aven’t we?” Janice asked Irene. “All these years… we’ve talked about it, obviously.”

“It must’ve been Creed, mustn’t it?” said Irene, with finality. “What other explanation is there? Where else could she have gone? Do you think they’ll let you in to see him?” she asked Strike again, with a last flicker of curiosity.