Dead And Buried

Twenty-six

‘That was quick, Jack,’ said Proud. ‘I wasn’t expecting to hear anything from you today.’

‘I’m afraid it’s nothing positive, sir,’ the towering McGurk replied, filling the door-frame as he looked into the chief’s office. ‘I thought I should tell you straight away, though. The DSS check shows no social-security payments by either Bothwell or Gentle since the time of their disappearance. It’s the same with the NHS: they were each registered to different Edinburgh practices, but nothing’s been added to their records since then.’

‘Mmm. It was too much to hope for, I suppose. In truth, I’m surprised that the health records are still accessible after all this time.’

‘There is one thing that might interest you, though. Gentle’s records show that on her last visit to her GP, she was prescribed the contraceptive pill.’

‘Was she, by God? It was only just becoming available back then. When did they put her on it?’

‘The February before she vanished.’

‘That was the first time she took it?’

‘Yes, sir; her only other visit to the surgery was for laryngitis, a year before that.’

‘That ties in, Jack. Annabelle told her sister at Easter that she’d met Bothwell and she was going to marry him. Going on the pill indicates that she became sexually active again, or at least she made plans to, just before that. I assume that having got herself pregnant once before, she’d learned her lesson.’

‘There’s something else, sir. I ran a check on Montserrat Bothwell too.’

‘Would she be an NHS patient, if she was a foreign national?’

‘She would as the wife of a UK subject, sir, and she was. She only used the service once, in the middle of June in that same year, when she had treatment for a broken nose. There was a note on the record that said she’d fallen at home.’

‘And you think?’

‘I wonder, sir, that’s all, whether she might have found out about Bothwell and Gentle, confronted him, and got a thumping for her trouble.’

‘You’re making me wonder the same thing, Jack. Well done, Sergeant. Off you go to the General Register Office and see what you can dig up there.’