Go Not Gently

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Nana Tello had come for tea. She was holding court in the kitchen as I walked in. Sheila, Maddie and Tom were at the table. Ray was at the cooker.

‘Hello, stranger,’ she interrupted her story to greet me. ‘You been on your bike?’

‘Yes.’ I peeled off my cagoule.

She shook her head, tutted, pulled a face. ‘It’s not safe. I don’t think it’s so good. The cars these days, they are so impatient.’

It was a fair comment but given the history of our relationship it felt as though she were criticising my recklessness in still cycling rather than anything else.

‘They have no manners, no courtesy.’ She grimaced her disapproval.

‘I can curtsy, look.’ Maddie leapt up and performed a jerky bob. Sheila and Ray burst out laughing.

‘I’ll have a wash,’ I muttered, and withdrew.

When I tried to ring Agnes there was no reply. She was probably visiting Lily.

Tea was a strained affair. Ray had made a baked aubergine dish which only Sheila and I enjoyed. Maddie declared it was like ‘slugs and blood’ and refused to try it. Tom followed suit. Meanwhile Nana Tello embarked on her customary discourse on the need for meat (red meat at that) in the human diet, especially for young children. I’d been through the argument with her before, as had Ray, but she still managed to needle him.

‘Come on, Ma,’ he said. ‘How many times a week could people back home afford meat? They didn’t have it every day, did they?’

‘Can we get chips?’ Maddie whined.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Aw. Please. Be your best friend. Please.’

‘No. If you don’t want this then you can have a sandwich.’

‘There’s beans,’ Ray offered.

‘I hate beans,’ Maddie announced with passion.

‘Since when?’

‘I hate beans too,’ Tom said.

‘No, you don’t, you’re just copying me. Copycat, copycat, you don’t know what you’re looking at.’

‘Sandwich, then.’ I got up and made a round of Marmite sandwiches. I wasn’t even going to introduce the option of what particular type of sandwiches were acceptable on this particular Friday.

Sheila had managed to steer Nana Tello off meat and on to Italy. Sheila had spent several holidays there and was extolling the delights of the different regions she’d visited. Nana Tello was beside herself with joy to find that Sheila knew her home town of Reggio Calabria and went off into long rhapsodies about the market, the churches, the people, the climate, the soil and the schools.

We made it through apple pie and ice cream and coffee without further tantrums.

Later, comfortably ensconced in the pub, I let Diane’s conversation and two pints of Boddies wash away my tension. Diane was still full of the Cornerhouse exhibition and a little daunted by the amount of work she needed to do for it. ‘And I’ve got to write one of those awful little autobiographies too. For the catalogue. That’s the pits,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine it? What do you say? What do you leave out?’

‘What do other people say?’

‘Well,’ she ran her hands through her hair, which had become a savage blue-black since we’d last met, ‘some of them go on about where they’ve trained, who’s influenced their work, then there’s the “loves crochet – lives with six cats” style..

‘You could stick in a bit of both.’

‘It’s so difficult, you’ve no idea. I spent three hours last night trying to come up with something but everything sounded either totally boring or horribly pretentious.’

‘How long does it have to be?’ I took another satisfying swallow of beer.

‘They said up to two hundred words.’

‘You could try keeping it really short.’

‘What, like “Diane Davis lives in Rusholme”?’

I grinned.

‘What do people really want to know?’ She threw her hands wide as she asked the question. ‘I mean, if you go to an exhibition, you can see the work, what more would you want to know about the artist?’

I thought for a moment, took a swig from my glass, frowned in concentration. ‘How many cats they’ve got and if they do crochet.’

‘Sod off.’

Over our next drink I told Diane about the case of the dodgy tablets.

‘Someone’s for the high jump then. What a cock-up. Reminds me of those awful stories about keeping weed-killer in pop bottles.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ I muttered.

‘Bit embarrassing, eh? Use the family firm and they give you seriously shoddy goods. You reckon this doctor’s in on it, then?’

‘I’m sure he is, but it’s just a gut feeling. I can’t find a reason for him to be deliberately overdosing patients, in fact some of the patients he had transferred to Kingsfield weren’t even on medication. He seems to have pretty easy access for his patients to the Marion Unit there – his brother-in-law is the consultant.’

‘All in the family. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours?’

‘Possibly. You wouldn’t think they could get away with it, what with all these reforms and the Patient’s Charter and all that. And the bottom line is the woman’s got advanced Alzheimer’s anyway. She was ill in spite of the tablets, not because of them.’

‘But they can’t have helped.’

‘Oh, no. Moira reckoned they would have made anyone demented, especially when mixed with other drugs.’

‘Do you think he’ll get away with it, then, that sort of negligence?’

I nodded. ‘Unless something else crops up he’s home free. Everything points to the chemist, who will probably be suspended or whatever they do. I don’t think there’s much to be done about the doctor using samples from Malden’s – free market and all that. Anyway the police are looking into it now. And I need to find some more work.’

‘You could run an ad again,’ Diane suggested.

‘Yeah. It’s about time I did something like that.’

‘Hey, you could make one of those ads for the cinema, you know, stick it in with the ones about local jewellers and car dealers.’

‘Oh, spare me, please.’

‘Or one of those videos they show in taxis,’ she cackled, ‘or a bulletin on the Internet.’

‘You need a computer first,’ I replied, ‘and seeing as neither of us has one…’

‘I’m going to get one.’

I stared at her.

‘Yep, CD ROM, colour printer, the lot, fax as well.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘My own personal technological revolution. You ought to think about it, Sal, you’ll get left behind.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Besides, I have thought about it, like window shopping. I just can’t afford it.’

‘When you win the Lottery…’

‘Hah!’ I sneered. ‘You have to play to win. I never play, thought you knew that. Even if I did I’ve more chance of flying to outer space than winning that.’

‘But just think, all the things you could do with a good system, with so much less effort.’

‘I know. I know, technology’s a wonderful thing. Take my answerphone…’

‘Sal!’ she complained.

‘Listen. My answerphone got someone off a murder charge.’ I told her about Jimmy Achebe’s alibi, how it fixed him in time and place.

‘But how did they know he wasn’t ringing from home,’ she asked, ‘pretending he was at work?’

‘Ah! Because you could hear the yard in the back ground, all these vans and a Tannoy, really clear. It was brilliant. It proved he was at work, miles away at about the time of the murder. And now it looks like they’re on to the right suspect.’

We nattered on some more about what we liked and didn’t about the new technology.

‘Promise me,’ said Diane, ‘if I ever get obsessive about it, you’ll tell me.’

‘Promise.’

‘Hey, maybe you could be the first virtual private eye, shadowing people down the Information Superhighway, uncovering virtual crime.’

‘What, for virtual money? Give over.’

I slept late on the Saturday morning. My cold was receding and I’d enough energy to make a start on planting up the cold frame. Maddie and I made a trip to the local garden centre and bought a selection of packets of seeds. I limited myself to petunias and lobelia for tubs and baskets, I could supplement them with cuttings I’d taken from ivy and pansies. I got some asters for the border and Maddie chose lettuce and candytuft for herself and Tom.

On the way back I called at the office to check my mail. There was a handwritten envelope. I didn’t recognise the writing. I opened it eagerly though I should have realised that no friend would write to me at my work address. Inside was a cheque, drawn on the account of Mr J. W. Achebe. Jimmy, paying off his debt. The fact he’d bothered to sort it out in the midst of what he must be going through brought a lump to my throat. There was a small note with it; it just read ‘Thank you.’ I sighed, put it in my drawer to deal with on Monday. Poor Jimmy. Now he was free to start grieving for the loss of Tina. There’d be all the arrangements to make for her funeral once they released the body. He’d been transformed from murderer to widower. Had friends and family believed him guilty, how would they ever face him again?

It was a mild, grey day and the two of us pottered nicely, filling old seed trays with compost, sprinkling on seeds, watering them gently and putting them in the frame.

Maddie wanted a picnic lunch so I heated a tin of soup and we sipped it from mugs, along with cheese rolls. She chattered on about school, mainly about Miss Bryan, her teacher, who she was deeply in love with. She wanted to be exactly like Miss Bryan, she was going to be a teacher like Miss Bryan, Miss Bryan had three earrings in one ear. I watched a magpie pulling twigs from a tree in the adjoining garden and flying off with them.

I left Maddie playing with her bike and went in to ring Moira. What had happened with the police?

‘They got the gist of it over the phone,’ she said, ‘then they sent a chap round last night, had to repeat it all again. Said it’d be Monday at least before they’d be doing anything – no point in calling on people over the weekend. Not a high priority for them, anyway.’

I rang Agnes too. Lily was neither better nor worse. They thought it was pneumonia. Agnes had been there the previous evening. I told her what the results were on the tablets.

‘I knew there was something wrong with them.’ She was triumphant. ‘I just knew it. Four times too strong. It really is disgraceful. How did it happen? Did he write out a faulty prescription?’

‘No, the label’s got the correct dosage on – it’s the tablets that are stronger than the label says. You’d only know that if you had them analysed. The mistake must have been made when they were being prepared.’

‘It’s a clear case of negligence, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Whoever’s got it wrong must be disciplined.’

‘Well, the police are involved now. My friend the GP who sent them to the lab had to report it so they’ll hopefully get to the bottom of it. But listen to this, they were made up at Malden’s, the place where Mrs Goulden works. I think Goulden’s covering up because Malden’s got it wrong. I bet he didn’t do anything after we went to see him, thought we were cranks, and now he’s realised…The others probably know too. It could ruin them, bad publicity and that, endangering life. But, Agnes, I think there’s more to it than just the tablets.’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t believe it’s just a coincidence that all these people are involved, both in the firm and in Lily’s case. I’m not that gullible. I talked to Mrs Knight and I’m sure she knew nothing about it, she was completely fazed when I told her about the dosage and she only lied about the tablets turning up because Goulden had bullied her into it. But I checked on Ernest Theakston – the other resident from Homelea who’d gone to Kingsfield this year. His case was totally different from Lily’s. He’d been ill for a long time, the progress of the disease was slow and he never had any medication from Malden’s. I can’t see any motive either. Just suppose we’re right, there’s something going on, Goulden gets funny tablets made up at his wife’s lab, gives them to Lily, who’s got dementia any way. She becomes even more demented, they can’t control her so she’s referred to Montgomery for assessment at Kingsfield.’

‘Then she falls,’ Agnes spoke calmly, ‘if she did fall.’

I thought of the other patient with her riddles about the fall. Was she pushed? They wouldn’t dare, would they? But no one had seen her fall, neither Mrs Li nor the nurse we’d seen. Who’d found her or seen it happen?

‘All right – if she did fall. So she has an operation to sort out the bleeding in her brain.’

‘She gets an infection.’

‘But apparently unrelated to the operation or the medication.’

There was a pause. We’d reached the end of the story so far.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘What’s it all for?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Agnes, ‘but I wasn’t born yesterday. I think you should tell the police everything you’ve found out, let them deal with it.’

I had my doubts, but rang off promising Agnes I’d contact the police.