The patient, p.17
The Patient, page 17
‘I’m just so happy he didn’t throw out my Concorde tray,’ he replied.
*
At lunchtime, Mackenzie ordered some beer and pizza for everyone. The six of them sat around talking well into the afternoon. Raymond wanted to know all about the renovation. He was keen to examine the wallpaper stripper. They told him of all the amazing things they’d found squirrelled away that had really intrigued them. He regaled them with stories of where he’d got hold of them and the improbable plans he had for their future use.
Harry had found an old Philips radiogram from the 1950s. His grandfather had had one. It was a great big rectangular box, encased in a box of walnut veneer. Across the front was a long dial with the names of radio stations printed along it, and it had huge plastic knobs. The front section was made from a beige fabric that concealed a large speaker behind it. On top was a turntable which you accessed by lifting a panel. It was like the bonnet of a car – it even had a metal stay to hold the top open.
Harry had cleaned it up and was excited to see that it was still in working order. They played jazz records from Raymond’s vinyl collection, which was now in pride of place on one of the bookshelves. Raymond then extolled the virtues of listening to vinyl records rather than digital. Its warmth and immediacy. How each scratch – though they wouldn’t find many on his collection, he proclaimed with pride – told a story of when and how it happened. He was thrilled when Roxy told him there was a vinyl revival going on with lots of young people buying records and turntables.
Mackenzie was talking to Cross at one point.
‘The storage unit was an inspired idea,’ she said.
‘I was just thinking the same thing,’ he replied.
‘Were you now?’ She smiled.
‘And how it would’ve been a lot cheaper and easier to have photographed the interior of someone else’s storage unit, told him it was his stuff and thrown his all away. He would never have known,’ he said.
‘Rubbish. He’d have found out at some point.’
Cross shook his head. ‘On the contrary; he’ll never go there. He just needs to know it’s there.’
‘How do you know that?’ she asked.
‘Because he’ll be too busy starting a new collection here.’
‘Well, there’s a job for you – to make sure he doesn’t,’ she said.
‘Easier said than done. He’s a difficult, recalcitrant old bugger, that one,’ he said, without a hint of self-awareness.
‘Like father like son, if you ask me,’ she said, and left before he could offer a retort.
*
After a couple of hours, Raymond was tired and needed a nap.
‘At least you’ll be able to find the bed,’ Harry joked.
Raymond swung round and gave him a deeply offended look. ‘What on earth do you mean by that, young man?’
Harry looked mortified, realising he’d overstepped the mark. His friends gave him a withering look.
‘I’m so sorry, Raymond—’ he began, but was cut off by a loud cackle of laughter bursting forth from the old man.
‘Ha! Got you!’ he said. ‘All of you!’ and he disappeared into his bedroom.
When it came to saying goodbye, the gang weren’t at all surprised, or offended, by the lack of warmth in Cross’s thanks. It was brief and perfunctory. What did surprise them, though, was when Cross handed them each an envelope containing one thousand five hundred pounds.
‘We can’t take this, George. It’s way too much,’ said Sanjeev.
‘How much is it?’ asked Mackenzie.
‘Fifteen hundred pounds each,’ said Cross.
‘George, mate. We can’t.’ Harry offered his envelope back.
Cross winced at being called ‘mate’ by this young man, but ignored his discomfort and said, ‘Nonsense. I made some enquiries from other tradesmen, and quotes for the work were all around seven thousand. So I took a small percentage off for your lack of experience and the fact that you obviously had no intention of paying tax, and came up with this. The correct figure.’
‘Thanks,’ said Roxy, who immediately lunged forward to hug Cross.
But he was too quick for her and stepped to one side. ‘You did an excellent job,’ he said. ‘Quite as good as I would’ve expected from a professional, in point of fact.’
‘Oh George, that’s so nice,’ said Mackenzie.
‘Not as good as a top-of-the-rung decorator, obviously,’ he said, ‘but certainly one of average talent, which was all I could afford, and certainly more than adequate for the job. I’ll see you tomorrow, Alice.’
Relieved all the social niceties were over, he marched down the path to find his bike. Except that he hadn’t brought it with him. He’d forgotten that he had come with Mackenzie. He stopped at the end of the path as this dawned on him and turned back to the young people, who were still watching him.
‘Would you like a lift?’ asked Mackenzie.
Chapter 32
Angie finally surfaced later that week, on the Thursday, at the dry cleaner’s. Karen called Cross. Angie was in the café opposite. This time she’d promised to wait for Cross. She was, like Karen, a skinny young woman in her early twenties. But Karen looked like a beacon of health in comparison. Angie’s hair was a mix of different faded colours from past experiments with dye. She was nervy and suspicious.
‘I thought you’d never come. I’ve been here ages,’ she started by saying.
Cross said nothing, just sat opposite her. She was fiddling with a rolled-up cigarette in her fingers. She had obviously been about to go out for a smoke, or perhaps it was a source of comfort – the fact that the next fag wasn’t too far away.
‘Karen said you wanted to see me.’
‘I do,’ Cross replied.
‘So are you going to buy me a tea or what?’ she asked.
‘If that’s what you want. How do you like it?’ he asked, getting up.
‘Milky, three sugars.’ Cross grimaced at the very idea of it.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she asked indignantly.
‘It almost seems like a waste of a tea bag,’ he replied and walked over to the counter.
He ordered the tea then looked at the young woman’s reflection in the window. Her face was the colour of a grey, dull sky in the middle of winter. She looked wretched, he thought. An adjective he felt was evocatively ideophonic on this occasion. ‘Wretched’. He went back over to the table.
‘Would you like some food?’ he asked.
‘I’d rather have some dosh.’
‘That may well be the case, but it’s not on offer. Would you like something to eat?’ he asked again.
‘Bacon sarnie.’
‘On brown or white?’
‘Proper little waiter, aren’t you?’ she snarled.
‘Very well, just tea then,’ said Cross, turning away.
‘All right, all right. White with brown sauce,’ she said quickly before he changed his mind.
They had already started talking when her sandwich was delivered to the table. She devoured it greedily. Brown sauce spilled out of the sides, down her chin and over her hands, but she was oblivious. Cross got up, went over to the counter and grabbed some paper napkins. He gave them to her and indicated her chin.
‘You not having anything?’ she asked with her mouth full, much to his discomfort.
‘No. Tell me about Flick,’ he said.
‘What about her? He done her in, most likely.’
‘Who?’
‘Stokes,’ she said, as if it should have been obvious to him.
‘What makes you say that?’ said Cross.
‘Because he’s a prick.’
‘You didn’t join Flick’s action against him. Why?’
‘Her lawyer said I was no use,’ she said sulkily.
‘But you’ve been clean, haven’t you?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. That’s where I met Flick. At Hopewell. They didn’t know, I reckon,’ she said.
‘Didn’t know what?’
‘That they were sending girls there just for him to try and fuck them any way he could.’
‘Karen said you’re using again because of Danny Stokes,’ he said.
She didn’t answer.
‘What did he do to you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No. It was the other girls. Guess I was too rough for him.’
‘I don’t think you’re telling me the truth.’
‘You calling me a liar?’
‘I don’t think you’re telling me everything. Would you prefer to talk to a female officer?’
‘I’d prefer not to talk to any of you, truth be told. We done here?’
‘Why did you agree to meet?’
‘Why d’you think? Thought there might be some cash in it for me. Why else?’
Cross got up without a word.
‘Is that it then?’ she asked.
Ignoring her he went up to the counter and gave the owner of the café thirty pounds to pay for food and tea for Angie for the next few occasions. Not for anyone else. Nor was he to give her the money. The owner agreed, putting the money in the till. Cross then wrote something on the back of his contact card and gave it to the owner. Angie watched Cross as he walked past her without a word and left the café. Then, once properly attired in his dayglo safety gear, he cycled off.
‘Well weird,’ Angie commented to herself, before venturing into the night to find out what dubious delights it held for her.
Chapter 33
Cross had been declining calls from an unknown number on his phone for the past couple of hours. When he got back to the office it rang again. Again he ignored it. It rang again. Whoever it was, was persistent. He decided to answer it.
‘Cross.’
‘DS Cross, it’s Moffatt. Are you able to come and see me?’
A little later he sat beside Esther’s bed at the appointed time. She had been very specific. She seemed to have sunk further into the bed since the last time he’d seen her. Her face was more drawn, the little skin left on it pulled tight around her eye sockets. She had noticed in the paper that there was a documentary on TV that night about a local woman who had decided to end her life, after a diagnosis of early onset dementia. She was going to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland with her family. What had interested Esther, though, was that the doctor, well, more accurately her therapist, who had accompanied the family and witnessed her death was Dr Benedict Sutton. She thought they should watch it together, which Cross had agreed to.
The journey to Switzerland was poignant, filled with laughter and tears of joy and sadness. They were a family of four – father, mother, adult son and daughter.
‘They look like a close family,’ observed Esther.
The children, even though adults, felt they were being abandoned by their mother, and said so. They then expressed awful guilt about having such feelings. The mother’s view was that dementia would take her away from them anyway – they would be abandoned whichever way you looked at it.
‘How dreadful for them,’ commented Esther.
The day after the family’s arrival in Switzerland, they travelled to a nondescript, modern house on a bleak industrial estate, where the mother took the poison prepared by the doctor for her. Her last words were a whispered, ‘My throat is so dry. Can I have some water?’ The doctor declined politely and quietly. Apparently there was a danger that the patient could choke.
Sutton had argued in the film against his being present, but the family insisted. As she died quietly, the camera focused on him. Cross assumed this was to give the family a moment of privacy at such a devastating moment. Sutton’s face gave nothing away, but as the family comforted each other, he slipped out of the room. The film crew followed him and then filmed him outside comforting the young director, who had broken down in tears.
‘Do you believe him?’ asked Esther.
‘Believe what exactly?’ Cross asked.
‘That he didn’t want to be there at the end. That it was a private moment for the family?’
‘I see no reason not to.’
‘I think he was acting a little.’
‘Possibly to conceal his own emotions. A voluntary death has just been administered in front of him. That’s a lot even for a medical practitioner to take in. A person taking someone else’s life right in front of him.’
‘True. I wonder if the family will face prosecution now this has been aired?’
‘The police are obliged to investigate,’ Cross said, knowing he was telling her something she was well aware of.
‘That would be one thing I wouldn’t want in my in-tray.’
‘I take it you approve of assisted dying then?’ said Cross.
‘In certain circumstances, yes.’
‘Would you be willing to go to Switzerland to die?’ Cross asked.
She smiled ruefully. ‘Oh, that won’t be necessary, George.’ It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name. He had no feelings about it either way.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I have late stage pancreatic cancer. I’m dying quite successfully on my own. No help necessary,’ she replied.
‘I see.’
At the end of the film Sutton talked about how dreadful it was that the family had to travel so far to find a solution and risk possible prosecution when they got home. He felt that she should have had the opportunity to die in her home, without the additional emotional turmoil and stress.
‘I think Sutton is worth looking at,’ Esther said, almost in a whisper. Cross sensed that his visit and watching the programme had tired her out.
‘Everyone is worth looking at.’
‘The daughter seemed the most conflicted of the kids,’ Esther reflected.
‘She did.’
‘Worth a visit?’ Esther enquired.
‘Indubitably.’
‘Thanks for indulging an old woman.’
He had no idea what she meant by this, so said ‘Goodbye’ and left.
As Cross left the care home he bumped into Mackenzie in reception.
‘You’re too late,’ he said.
‘Oh my God what’s happened?’ she asked.
‘It’s over.’
‘But that was so sudden.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I think it finished at the scheduled time.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The documentary DCI Moffatt wanted to watch. What are you doing here?’
She held up a chemist’s carrier bag. ‘I’m going to do her nails.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I thought it would be nice for her.’
‘I see. Well then, I’ll leave you to it,’ and so saying he spun on his heels and left.
Chapter 34
Back at his flat Cross looked at his mother’s letter to his father again, not to reread the contents, which he pretty much knew by heart now, but to double-check the address. It was in Gloucester, where he was going the next day. Ottey and Mackenzie were going to visit Sandra. He was fairly sure the address he had was where his grandparents had lived. He knew they’d lived in Gloucester but they had ceased contact with him and Raymond at the same time as their daughter. He knew it was unlikely that she would still be there after all these years, but it was the only starting point he had. He had checked social media for her in her married and maiden names, but hadn’t come across anything. It was quite possible, probable even, that she had remarried and had a different name. But it was also possible that she, like him, chose not to make her life publicly accessible on the various social media platforms.
If Cross needed to travel any distance on a case he would always take the train, with his bicycle in the carriage with him or in the guard’s van, depending on the type of train. He loved trains; always had done. He loved their predictability and hated it if they were late. He felt modern trains had lost something, though. The new carriages were soulless affairs. He liked the older trains, particularly if they had small compartments. He liked it when the cushioned seats were covered with thick, almost velvety moquette.
He vividly remembered whiling away time on a tedious journey with his father to visit some piece of Brunel engineering somewhere, by making patterns in the seat material. He would do this by brushing the fabric against the pile, making it go darker, then brushing with the pile to make it smooth and light. With a sweep of his hand he could then erase the pattern permanently, leaving no trace of his artistic endeavours. He remembered to this day the names of some of the designs used by the railways in his childhood and teens. There was Trojan, his favourite Red Candy Stripe, and then in later years the Inter City Dogger Red.
The seats also had two very distinct seasonal smells. When it was raining and the seats got wet from people sitting on them or inconsiderately placed umbrellas, they had a smell of damp autumnal rot. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant, as it had an association of being recently sheltered from the rain outside. In the summer they had a musty smell of roasted dust, which seemed to impart the joy of journeying to an eagerly anticipated destination, which promised familiar treats like pier amusements and ice cream. There was something comforting and familiar about those smells. Now the seats offered no sensory additions to a journey. They were functional, bland and without personality. Like much of modern life, Cross thought.
Mackenzie had found contact details for Melissa Conrad, the daughter in the documentary, from the production company who had made it. They informed her that Melissa was happy for Cross to contact her. He had called and made an appointment for that afternoon. He had forewarned her that he wanted to talk to her about the documentary and specifically Sutton. He hoped this might give her time to think and formulate her thoughts about the doctor and the film. This way he thought he might get a more cogent and considered reaction from her, rather than just arriving cold.
Melissa Conrad lived in the small town of Quedgeley, outside Gloucester. It had an interesting-sounding name for such a dull, modern place. She was married now, and a new mother, at home with her six-month-old daughter. She greeted Cross at the door with a muslin cloth over one shoulder and the baby over the other.
