Palindrome Read online

  Most people liked Oxford. Pat enjoyed living in the country and working in the town at her college. But Oxford was not to Adam’s taste. Really, if the two of them did not have such good jobs he would not have chosen to live here. London suited him better. There were more people there; that diluted the effect of them, particularly those he found least personable.

  “Long time no see,” a voice he recognised as Nick Grant’s said behind him. “You look as if you’re going to fall into that beer.”

  “Perhaps that’s because I don’t normally drink during the day.”

  “Ah, but I can see you’re developing a taste for the practice.”

  “It was your idea to meet here.”

  “And a splendid one, don’t you agree? Doesn’t hurt, you know. Look at me. A shining example of the beneficial effects of regular midday refreshment.”

  Nick Grant spread out his arms, one of which contained a full beer glass. His pose was that of someone exhibiting his nakedness. Gabriel was grateful he was clothed. He had put on weight around the hips. His once abundant black curly hair was now grey and had largely disappeared from his skull. His face was a trifle pinched but it still retained traces of that easy charm which always won him more friends than enemies. Something of an aura of turbulent domesticity surrounded him. He had a missing button on his jacket and a stain on his trousers. He looked both sad and happy but probably more happy than sad.

  Gabriel and Grant had been pals — regular drinking pals at that — back in the days when they were training in London. They had gone their separate ways after Grant, much to Gabriel’s surprise, had chosen to specialise in forensic pathology. Now, though his patch as a forensic pathologist covered London and the home counties, the two met very infrequently in Oxford. It was not that they deliberately avoided meeting each other; it was just that neither of them had the time, or perhaps the inclination, to seek each other out and renew their acquaintance. This they both seemed to regret whenever they did meet, promising to put it right and see each other more often. But somehow it never happened. Perhaps they both believed that the next time — this time — would be different.

  Grant had been married three times — he was clearly living his own personal palindrome — to a series of very pretty and very pleasant women. It puzzled Gabriel that Grant, who always seemed so easy-going, could have failed to get on with even one of them. Each time they met Gabriel struggled to remember the name of Grant’s last wife. This time was no exception.

  “How is—?”

  “Carla,” Grant interrupted him, not at all phased by Gabriel’s difficulty; he had clearly learned to deal with it.

  Gabriel resisted the temptation to ask what had happened to her predecessor, whom he had again thought very nice and pretty, and he steered the conversation to his children.

  “Which ones?”

  “How many do you have now?”

  “Four. None with Carla — yet. But I think she’s getting broody. Not sure if I can afford any more at my age.”

  “X and S were always your middle initials.”

  “What do they stand for?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Well my kids are certainly excess baggage in my life at the moment. I had my son over last weekend. I paid his university fees and he’s finished economics at LSE. We get along well and he is an intelligent kid. But that doesn’t stop him expecting me to fund his postgraduate studies. He knows that I have to support three wives and their open-mouthed chicks. He can see that I hardly live like a king. I can’t help thinking that if I had done economics and had a father whom I could see was feeling the pinch, I would have offered to delay continuing my studies and found a job instead. And then there’s Susie, my eldest daughter. She’s never come to me even once to say: “Dad, I don’t need a holiday this year.” Done the exact opposite in fact and asked me if I have any spare cash to fund a trip to Australia with her loathsome boyfriend.”

  “There’s no point blaming your kids for not turning out as you expected,” Gabriel said. “I’ll bet you must have seemed the same to your parents.”

  “At least I didn’t sponge off them. My kids couldn’t give a damn about me. I mean what good are they?”

  “They’re a different generation. Like Anna Taylor.”

  “Which is why I guess you wanted to see me?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “Well, at least she had a job.” Grant interrupted himself to take a long swig of his beer. “I can’t believe that whatever she did to her parents merited what happened to her.”

  “What do you mean?” Gabriel asked.

  “Her murder was wicked. Nasty. A cowardly crime. The killer struck while she was looking down the microscope. She never knew what was coming.”

  “The police have the idea it might have been a robbery that went wrong.”

  “I can’t see it that way myself. She would hardly have turned her back on an intruder for the purpose of examining a slide. If you ask me the murderer must have struck suddenly while she was looking down the microscope. He must have grabbed hold of her hair and pulled back her head with his left hand and cut her throat with his right hand. You can tell from the shape of the wound that her throat was cut from left to right. The murderer must have been right-handed.”

  “Like the majority of the population Can you tell anything more from the throat wound?”

  The pale blue eyes were suddenly lost in speculation. “It was a very clean single cut so the murderer must have used a very sharp instrument to do the deed. The blade would have been more than a few inches long. The cut was angled down.”

  “Not an ordinary knife? Like a kitchen knife?”

  “No. More like a cut throat razor.”

  Gabriel was lost in thought.

  “Loss of consciousness and death would have been fairly instantaneous,” Grant added. “There was blood everywhere. Over her microscope and desk. The murderer would have been covered in it as well.”

  “Brook says that the murderer must have worn boots and some sort of protective clothing. There was no blood outside Anna’s office. So he or she must have taken them off before leaving.”

  Grant nodded. “More likely a he, I’d say.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The force needed to cut someone’s throat with a single clean cut like that must have been considerable, even with a very sharp knife or razor. It’s not that easy to do. It must have taken a fair bit of resolve as well. Not really something I’d associate with a woman. Not an ordinary woman, anyway.”

  There was a brief pause. Gabriel sipped his beer. Grant gulped down his pint and went to the bar and ordered another. It was poured immediately and he paid with the exact money; he seemed to know beforehand how much it would be.

  When he sat down again he slopped his beer on his trousers. Typical, thought Gabriel who saw Nick as a figure at once comic and tragic. But behind his clumsy, “hail fellow” exterior there was a sharp mind — “a man of nice judgement” as Sydney Greenstreet (playing Kasper Gutman) says of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

  “Why are you so interested anyway?” he asked Gabriel.

  “Well, she used to be my student. Was even thinking of coming back.”

  “A glutton for punishment.”

  Gabriel smiled but did not join Grant in laughing at his own remark. Anna’s death was not really a laughing matter for him.

  He took a sip of beer before replying. “At least it’s considerably cleaner than your game. Less smelly too, I would have thought.”

  “I can’t argue with you there,” Grant turned his blue eyes towards the window where a couple of female students were sharing a drink. “Not enough money in it either.”

  Gabriel suddenly felt very fond of Grant. Simplicity in friends, like certainty in diagnosis, attracted him. And Grant was simple; or at least his goals were simple — women, job, money. From the way Grant talked you could have concluded that he had succeeded by failing in all three.

 
Looking at Grant’s glass on the table, Gabriel somewhat contrarily said, “Life’s not so simple now. It’s different from the old days.”

  Grant replied for the second time, as though it were a phrase he didn’t have to use his brain in forming, “I can’t argue with you there.”

  “Where are you living now?”

  “I’m in Wycombe,” Grant answered. “It’s convenient for London and the other places where I have work.”

  It’s still “‘I’m” and not “We’re” with him, Gabriel noted.

  “That’s not far from Boarstall,” Gabriel answered after they had both finished their drinks. “You must come round. You remember where we live.”

  He had little expectation of his invitation being accepted. Gabriel recalled that he had said the same thing to Grant the last two times they had met and he had not followed up on one of his invitations. Grant none the less responded warmly to the spirit of Gabriel’s invitation, leaving some hope that it might be different this time. “It’ll be good to see Pat again. You are still married to her, right?”

  Gabriel nodded. “Oh yes. No escape there.”

  “Brook will need a break to get anywhere in this murder,” said Grant, suddenly shredding Gabriel’s complacency. “And where do you think that will come from?”

  Grant shook his head. “I don’t know. It probably won’t come from the forensics but the murderer will have to fit whatever forensic data there is. If the police can find him, that is.”

  “Police no good then?”

  “No good is not the phrase I’d use. Misguided, misled and hyper-earnest about the wrong things is what I’d say. Sometimes they don’t see the wood for the trees. Brook’s better than most.” He looked searchingly at Gabriel. “Have you anything they haven’t? I’m not talking about intelligence of course. Anything factual.”

  “I’m not able to say at the moment.”

  A concentrated silence fell between them. The two men seemed to recognise that this was to be the final word on the matter. Their meeting had been squeezed dry. Nothing more could be expected of it.

  Grant stood up. Gabriel waited for him as he put on his jacket which he had hung over his chair. They left together and a minute later were shaking hands outside the pub.

  “Good to see you again,” Gabriel said in farewell. He looked relieved to be returning to the axis of his own existence but could not stop himself saying, “Don’t forget to come and visit us in Boarstall.”

  “My car’s parked across the road,” Grant said by way of answer, waving his hand in that direction. He sounded merry. “Can I give you a lift back to the hospital?”

  “No,” said Gabriel. “My car’s parked at the college. I’ve got to go to a meeting there on...”

  His voice trailed off as Grant, not waiting for him to finish, got into his car and drove off, leaving Gabriel on the pavement’s edge wondering why he felt a bit of a goose because he had not drunk as much as Grant, knowing full well that even if he had, he would still have felt a bit of a goose.

  “Funding’s a lot tighter in the NHS now,” said Poole. “Things have changed and all departments, including the Pathology Service, will have to change too. There are staffing issues to address.”

  “But my department has enough to do, just getting through the work,” Gabriel answered. “We don’t have enough staff to carry out the kind of audit you want or the time to play management games.”

  “But it’s essential that the hospital has the information,” Poole responded, sympathetic but firm, like a father with an awkward child.

  Gabriel was irritated by his attitude. “I can’t see what you’ll achieve by getting us to produce a review detailing our practice. There are already national guidelines for Pathology departments. We fulfil them in terms of output and, by the way, fall well short of them in terms of funding and staffing.”

  “The review has been ordered by the Health Department.”

  “Look, Tony, we’ve been doing this job for years with barely enough staff. The work’s been going up year on year by about 5%. What more do you want to know?”

  “All hospitals have to look to where they can make savings and generate revenue. What about all the referrals from other NHS hospitals?”

  “What is the point of billing them? It’s one NHS, after all. That will just make more work for managers at different hospitals who’ll have to figure out how much to bill each other for work on patients who end up being treated here anyway. The whole thing would be just a paper exercise — sending invoices and receipts back and forth from one hospital to another. No money actually changes hands in the NHS. It would be as pointless as—” he struggled to find the right word, “—as a palindrome. And what are we billing for? We don’t shift products. We run a diagnostic department. A service not a business...”

  Poole looked hard at Gabriel. Something began to stick in Gabriel’s throat. He could tell that Poole was considering just how much to threaten him. His reply, when it came, was more measured than he expected.

  “You know, Adam, that there are nationally agreed targets and that there’s a duty for all health professionals in the NHS to meet them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have to report to the hospital Trust board tomorrow and I’ll need to be able to tell them what measures the hospital has taken to measure performance against these targets. Where we’re doing well; where we’re doing badly, and why; who’s to blame...”

  Was Poole trying to frighten him? After all, Gabriel was getting on and he had a pension to consider.

  “You can see how it is, can’t you?” Poole went on. “It’s not like the old days in the NHS...”

  Gabriel was no match for Poole when it came to this sort of thing. He just wanted to get on with his work. No more. The data Poole wanted would take a lot of time to collect. In all likelihood it would fall to him to present a report to the hospital management committee. For Poole and his like process was everything; the Health Department was everything; experience and common sense counted for nothing.

  Gabriel felt inside himself a rising fury against Poole, this posturing, “holier than thou” functionary with his short curly greying hair and reasonable smile. He seemed to have been listening to him for an eternity. The urgent sound of his speech and his pedantic language made him wilt. He stared fixedly at Poole as though trying to hypnotise him to go, but he was proof against suggestion and just kept sitting there talking, talking...

  In the end Gabriel, anxious to extricate himself before he said something he might regret later, muttered, “We’ll do what we can.” The words sounded choked, as if he did not really mean them.

  “I’ll put the Clinical Services manager onto it,” Poole said. “He may be able to help. The information is needed for the staff review, the Agenda for Change that’s planned.”

  There was complete silence from Gabriel. He had stopped listening and was slowly recovering himself.

  Poole got up suddenly and offered Gabriel his damp hand. His face wore the smile he normally reserved for the old ladies who ran the hospital League of Friends. “You can count on me, Adam, you know that. You can count on my support.”

  As Gabriel shook his hand, he thought, My God, what a slug you are, Poole. Wherever you go you leave a slimy trail. I’ll have to wash my hand after you leave. Probably the carpet as well.

  When he was finally alone Gabriel sat down before his microscope. In the past when he had worked with managers, they had seemed to him devious or simple. Whatever Poole was about, it wasn’t simple: his department was clearly in the firing line of the cuts being planned and he would have a job resisting them.

  Rain lashed the windows. He sat back in his chair and stared through the drenched pane. He was tired. He glanced at his In-tray. There were a lot of slides to examine, cases to report. He would have to deal just as seriously and immediately with the threat of Poole as he would with the next difficult tumour case.

  Chapter 7

  Red root put up to order


  If the intention was to impress potential stakeholders in Nebotec with the Oxford imprimatur then the large front quad of Palmer’s college with its seventeenth century buildings and cloistered passages was certainly likely to do the trick. It was something of a let down, however, to leave all that history behind and follow a long series of Nebotec signs (again the arrow motif) to the rear of the college. There was a quad here too but it was largely one of featureless brick and concrete with a central small cypress. From here the last sign pointed toward a set of wrought iron gates behind which there was a glass-fronted modern lecture theatre building named after an Asian benefactor to the college.

  Gabriel was surprised by the number of people at the symposium. Perhaps Palmer had been right and Anna’s death had aroused an unwholesome public interest in the work of Nebotec. The registration desk was manned by Nebotec staff. Hewitt was very much in evidence, fluttering in the background like a vicar at a church fete in which the colourful stalls were flogging Nebotec products rather than tombola tickets. Palmer stood by the door of the lecture theatre, talking secretively to a number of suited types. In that pose he reminded Gabriel of a photograph he had seen of Jowett of Balliol, the scheming Oxford classicist. His eyes flitted from time to time away from those to whom he spoke as though seeking someone more important. That was certainly not Gabriel as Palmer looked for a time straight through him without the faintest sign of recognition.

  Brook was there too, trying vainly to blend his tall figure into the background. He wore a dark tie and looked as if he had mistaken the symposium for Anna Taylor’s funeral.

  Gabriel found himself a seat in one of the back rows of the lecture theatre and watched each new arrival with interest. A few minutes after taking his seat he saw Matt Taylor enter and walk slowly down the steep steps to the front of the lecture theatre. He halted slightly before taking each step, as if constantly steadying himself, making certain there was no chance that he would fall. His movements were self-conscious, controlled; he looked as though he was playing a role but Gabriel could not decide if it was that of weary bereaved husband or important scientist. Taylor exchanged a few words with the lecture theatre technician as his presentation was loaded onto the computer and then took a seat two rows back from the lectern.