Gillian Galbraith: Blood In The Water

Alice cradled her coffee mug in her hands as she looked at the typed note from Inspector Manson that lay uppermost on her desk: ‘Been to Little France, saw three of Dr Clarke’s colleagues in the Obs and Gynae Department, Dr Ian Cross, Dr Robin Maxwell and Dr Kobi al-Alboudie. They say Dr Clarke was ambitious, hard-working and competent. Also “reserved”, “independent”, “self-contained” and Dr Maxwell says she was a bit “unapproachable”. None knew her well enough to know anything about her private life but they all assumed that she was unattached and probably celibate!! I couldn’t see Dr Ann Williams, the only other member of the department, she’s on annual leave at home. Lives in Drummond Place. Can you go and see her a.s.a.p? You’ll probably get more out of her anyway both being professional women, female professionals, whatever!’

Chaos reigned in Ann Williams’ kitchen. The floor was covered with a strange assortment of bricks, jigsaw pieces, fridge magnets, crayons and paper. A dog lay chewing the plastic, severed head of a doll, and three little children, two girls and a boy, were standing on stools at the sink, dipping miniature plates and saucers into lathery water with both taps running. ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ was being belted out by a cassette player in a next door room. Dr Williams left the dicing of carrots, for a chicken stock boiling on the stove, to answer the doorbell.

Alice sat beside her at the table as the woman resumed her chopping, and attempted to concentrate on the task in hand in amongst all the colour, noise and commotion around her. Dr Williams kept her eyes unwaveringly on the children as her knife cut through the carrots, and watching her, Alice half expected to find a severed finger in amongst the heap of prepared vegetables. She began her preamble, but Dr Williams interrupted, explaining, almost impatiently, that she was well aware of her colleague’s death as she’d already had news of it from a friend at work. She seemed to understand, without having been told, what was required of her, and began to talk about Elizabeth Clarke unbidden.

‘She was an excellent doctor. Not just clever, though she was that too, but compassionate and with a genuine devotion to her work and her patients, or most of them. She was also an ambitious woman… and that doesn’t always go down well.’ Ann Williams caught Alice’s eye, as if to see whether she understood the nature of the unspoken difficulty. Being met with a rueful smile, she went back to her theme: ‘She was a bit impatient sometimes, with her less able colleagues I mean, not the patients as far as I am aware. She could seem a bit cool, detached, really, but she wasn’t, just completely absorbed in her work. She hated office politics, networking, all those kind of things, even though they are the very kind of things that help on the ascent up the ladder. I think she was generally liked by her subordinates, though she may have intimidated some of them. She did have professional rivals, I suppose I’d be one, but no enemies or anything like that. What else do you need to know?’

‘Any boyfriends?’

‘Up until about a year ago she was going out with someone called Ian Melville, a painter, an artist or whatever. He lives somewhere out near Leadburn. I only met him twice and, to be frank, I didn’t take to him one bit. Arrogant creature. Wrote me off as a philistine when I admitted I’d never heard of someone called Malevich. She’s had no one since.’

‘Why did they break up?’

A tremendous clattering noise followed immediately by piteous wailing brought the conversation prematurely to an end. One of the little girls had fallen from her stool and lay sprawled on the floor, face downwards and crying. Dr Williams rushed to the fallen child, kissed her injured knee and placed her back on the stool, making soothing noises as she did so. She then rolled up all the children’s sleeves before returning to the table.

She repeated the question put to her. ‘Why did they break up… Well-’, she hesitated, plainly considering whether or not to go on, and then continued, her vegetable knife idle in her hand, ‘…I think they broke up because Liz had a termination. She didn’t tell Ian that she was pregnant until after she had undergone it. That was the end of that. The relationship, I mean. I don’t know if he could have forgiven her but she never gave him the chance anyway. The whole thing was a horrible mistake, for both of them probably. I think that she would have broken up with him even if there had been no baby. I never really understood how they got together in the first place, and I was amazed that it lasted as long as it did. Maybe she was just lonely and he was the only port in a storm. He wasn’t husband material, or certainly not for her.’

Loud shouts had begun to come from the sink area. The ownership of one of the doll’s plates was in dispute. It was being pulled between one of the little girls and her brother. Suddenly his rival let go of the slippery plastic and the boy toppled off his stool onto the floor, clutching his prize. The impact was accompanied by a loud crack, and then full-lunged crying.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Dr Williams muttered, briefly rubbing her eyes with her hands before sighing loudly and rising to tend to the child. As she was doing so his sister coolly got off her stool and took the plate from beside him as he lay there. A new chorus of ‘Three Little Monkeys’ started up on the cassette, and Alice decided, without regret, that the time to leave the scene of controlled chaos had arrived.

Dr Clarke’s mother had been tracked down to an address in Haddington, and the two Detective Sergeants travelled there together in a white Astra from the pool. The woman lived in the Sidegate, in a perfect little Georgian doll’s house in a terrace of such houses. Mrs Clarke, on first seeing the place over eleven years ago, had determined that this was to be her final home, a house that she would exit from feet first only. It was close to Elizabeth, close to St Mary’s, close to the River Tyne, and if she had to live on cardboard for the rest of her life to get it, then so be it. It would be worth it. The quiet little market town of Haddington suited her needs well, being big enough to host a decent choir but small enough for the locals to be recognised by the shopkeepers, even at the check-out in the supermarket. She had never contemplated life there all on her own, without her daughter nearby. Elizabeth was never ill, had never as much as broken a bone in her body, and was over thirty years younger than her. Why should she?

She knew the police were coming, knew as a result of the telephone call why they were coming. Somehow she had managed not to collapse on seeing her only child, Elizabeth, dead, laid out on a cold, mortuary table. She repeated the words in her head, ‘Elizabeth. Dead.’, as if by doing so she would rob them of meaning or make them untrue or, at the very least, accustom herself to their import. The jangling of her nerves as the doorbell rang reminded her, as if she needed it, of the intense emotional state she was in, although, so far, she had managed externally to conceal it. Composure mattered. If you seemed to be in control then, to all intents and purposes, you were in control and, at times like this, control was paramount. She showed the two sergeants into her drawing room, noticing, as she did so, that the poinsettia in the alcove seemed to have dried out, its red leaves tinged with brown. Her offer of tea was declined and Mrs Clarke began to speak about her child, fastidiously correcting her tenses to reflect the death of her daughter.