Not Dead Enough

78

Thirty minutes later, Emma-Jane Boutwood was wheeled along a network of corridors, into a much more modern section of the hospital.

Grace waited until the young DC was installed in her sunny, private room, with a view out across the rooftops to the English Channel, then gave her the flowers and left, after receiving a promise from the hospital’s Mr Big, down a phone line from his ivory tower, that she would remain in this room until she was discharged.

Following the directions he had been given back to the front entrance, he stopped at an elevator and hit the button. After a lengthy wait, he was about to give up and walk down when suddenly the doors slid open. He stepped in and nodded at a tired-looking young Indian man, who was taking a bite on an energy snack bar.

Dressed in green medical pyjamas, with a stethoscope hanging from his neck, the man was wearing a name tag which read Dr Raj Singh, A&E. As the doors closed, Grace suddenly felt stifling heat; it was like being in an oven. He noticed the doctor was staring at him curiously.

‘Hot day,’ Grace said politely.

‘Yes, a little too hot,’ the man replied in a cultured English accent, then he frowned. ‘Excuse me asking, but you look familiar. Have we met?’

Grace had always had a good memory for faces – almost photographic at times. But this man’s did not ring any bells. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied.

The lift stopped and Grace stepped out. The doctor followed him. ‘In the Argus today, is it your photograph?’

Grace nodded.

‘That explains it! I was just reading it, a few minutes ago. Actually, I had been thinking of contacting your inquiry team.’

Grace, distractedly anxious to get on and back to the office, was only giving Dr Singh half an ear now. ‘Really?’

‘Look, it’s probably nothing, but the paper says you’ve asked people to be vigilant and report anything suspicious?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well – I have to be careful about patient confidentiality, but I saw a man in here yesterday and he really made me feel uncomfortable.’

‘In what way?’

The doctor glanced around the empty corridor, looked sternly at a fire hydrant, then turned back to check the lift doors were closed. ‘Well, his behaviour was very erratic. He shouted at the receptionist, for instance.’

Nothing erratic about that, Grace thought privately. He was sure plenty of people got shouted at in here regularly, with good reason.

‘When I saw him,’ the doctor continued, ‘he seemed extremely agitated. Don’t get me wrong, I see plenty of people with psychiatric problems, but this man just seemed to be in a state of high anxiety about something.’

‘What was his injury?’

‘Here’s the thing. It was an infected wound in his hand.’

Suddenly Grace was paying a lot more attention. ‘From what?’

‘Well, he said he had shut it in a door, but it didn’t look like that to me.’

‘Shut it in a door?’ Grace queried, thinking hard about Bishop’s explanation for his injury – that he had bashed it getting into a taxi.

‘Yes.’

‘So what did it look like to you?’

‘A bite. I would say a human bite quite possibly. You see, there were marks on both sides of the hand – on the wrist, then on the underside just below the thumb.’

‘If he’d shut a car door or a boot lid on it, there would have been marks both sides.’

‘Yes, but not curved ones,’ the doctor replied. ‘They were semi-lunar upper and lower, consistent with a mouth. And there were puncture marks of varying depths, consistent with teeth.’

‘What makes you think they were human? Could they have been from an animal? A large dog?’

The doctor blushed. ‘I’m a bit of a crime fiction addict – I love reading forensic crime novels, when I get the time – and watch programmes like CSI on television.’ His beeper went. He paused a moment, then carried on, ‘But you see, there’s another thing I deduced.’ He paused again, looking stressed, to read the message on the machine’s display. ‘The thing I deduced is that if it was a dog bite, then why would he have denied it? If it was a human bite that he received during an attack, I can of course see why he denied it. Then, when I saw the horrible news about this murdered young woman, I sort of put two and two together.’

Grace smiled. ‘I think you’d make a good detective! But it’s a big two and two,’ he replied. ‘Can you describe this man to me?’

‘Yes. He was about six foot, very lean, with quite long brown hair, dark glasses and a heavy beard. It was quite hard to see his face clearly. He was wearing a blue linen jacket, a cream shirt, jeans and trainers. He looked a bit of a scruff.’

Grace’s heart sank; this did not sound like Bishop at all, unless he had gone to the trouble of disguising himself, which was always a possibility. ‘Would you recognize him if you saw him again?’

‘Absolutely!’

‘Would this man have been picked up on some of the hospital’s CCTV cameras?’

‘We have one in A&E, he’d be on that for sure.’

Grace thanked him, wrote down his name and phone numbers, then went off in search of the hospital’s CCTV monitoring suite, unclipping his BlackBerry and checking his emails as he walked.

There was one from Dick Pope, in response to the email he had sent him earlier this morning with the photographs he had taken in Munich. It stopped him in his tracks.

Roy, this is not the woman Lesley and I saw last week. We really are convinced we saw Sandy. Best, Dick