Peter James - You Are Dead

One such new patient, Freya Northrop, perched nervously on the edge of one of the two oak and leather chairs in front of his tidy, leather-topped desk, while he talked very charmingly and calmly to someone called Maxine on the other end of the phone. She was clearly distressed about her mother, who sounded, from what Freya could glean, terminally ill and in her last weeks.

The only clue about the doctor’s private life was a silver frame on his desk, containing a posed studio photograph of an attractive brunette in her mid-forties with mirror-image beautiful teenage daughters on either side against a sky-blue background. All of them were laughing at some joke cracked, presumably, by the professional photographer.

While he continued talking, making a promise to try to get the woman’s mother admitted into the Martlets Hospice, Freya Northrop stared around the room. Most doctors’ offices she had been in before were pretty nondescript. But this one was really rather grand, and it had more the feel of museum than a workplace. The wall just to her left displayed photographs and portraits of great medical pioneers; one she recognized as Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, and another, the pioneer of X-rays, Marie Curie, with all their names and brief bios in small frames at their bases. Further along was a row of framed copies of Leonardo Da Vinci’s anatomical drawings.

There was a display case full of model human skulls. Next to them, and standing tall and proud as if presiding over the room, was a human skeleton on a plinth. It partially blocked the view from the office’s one window, with Venetian blinds that were open, looking out onto a parking area at the rear of the building.

The doctor made a note on a pad on his desk with a black Montegrappa pen, then typed something on his computer, all the time continuing to try to reassure the woman called Maxine on the other end.

There were several busts on plinths around the room, adding to the museum-like feel. Freya gazed at one, a man with a curiously elliptical-shaped bald dome and a beard that looked like flames.

‘First do no harm!’ The doctor’s tone had changed.

Startled, Freya looked around and saw he had his hand cupped over the mouthpiece of the phone and was addressing her, with an almost childlike twinkle of humour.

‘Do no harm?’ she replied.

‘Hippocrates! The fellow you’re looking at. Bit of a wise old owl. The Hippocratic Oath all medics around the world take, swearing to practise medicine honestly, and all sorts of related stuff. Actually, it wasn’t Hippocrates who said “Do No Harm”, it was a nineteenth-century surgeon, Thomas Inman.’

‘Ah!’

‘Won’t keep you a second.’ He pointed at the phone. ‘I have a very worried and upset lady, just need to wait for her to speak to her mother. Yes, Hippocrates!’

The doctor, while he continued with his phone call, was studying this new young patient in front of him. Conservatively dressed, in her twenties, she had a classically beautiful face, with deep brown eyes framed by long hair parted down the centre. She reminded him of the actress Julie Christie, whom he’d had the hots for when he had been a teenager. She reminded him of someone else, too, but that was painful and he pushed the memory aside.

Finally ending the call, he gave her a broad smile. ‘So, I haven’t seen you before, have I?’ He glanced at her name on the computer screen, having to make a real effort to focus. ‘Freya?’

‘No, I’ve not come to you before,’ Freya Northrop said.

‘Interesting name, Northrop. Hmmn. Northrop Frye. Ever read him?’

She shook her head blankly.

‘Wonderful literary critic! Wrote some brilliant essays on T. S. Eliot. Really helped raise his profile. Milton’s too — especially Paradise Lost. ’

‘Ah,’ she said, equally blankly.

‘His first name was Herman.’

‘Ah,’ she said again, a little disconcerted by the curious conversation.

Her best friend, Olivia Harper, had said that Crisp was a wonderful doctor, and so jolly. But he seemed more odd than jolly, to her. She felt as if she was irritating him with her ignorance. ‘T. S. Eliot, I’ve heard of him.’

‘ The Waste Land ?’

‘OK, right.’

‘You know the poem?’

‘I don’t, no.’

Edward Crisp’s mind went back to last night. Walking Smut across Hove Lagoon. You could walk dogs along Brighton and Hove seafront in winter without them having to be on a lead. And sometimes in the evening, when it was dark enough, he could let Smut, his white mongrel with a black spot either side of her tummy, who he’d acquired as a rescue dog ten years ago, shit anywhere she liked without having to stoop and pick up the mess with a plastic bag or, like some cretinous dog people, with a pooper scooper.

He was thinking about that terrible image of the skeleton, lying exposed in the ragged hole in the path. He could not get her out of his mind.

‘ The Waste Land ?’

The young patient’s words jolted him back to reality. ‘ I grow old ,’ he said. ‘ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. ’

Freya Northrop frowned.

‘“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”,’ he said, and beamed. ‘But enough of that. I’m sorry if I’m not totally with it today, I saw a terrible thing last night, and I’m a bit upset. I’m a doctor, I try to make people better. I couldn’t help that poor woman. But that’s enough about me, let’s talk about you. Tell me why you are here?’

‘Olivia Harper recommended you. I’ve just moved to Brighton from London.’

‘Ah yes, indeed, what a lovely lady Olivia is. Quite a delight. Yes, of course. Forgive me, I’m very discombobulated this morning. But of course you don’t want to hear that. Tell me what brings you here?’ He smiled, his eyes suddenly alive and twinkling with humour. He held his elegant, black pen up in front of him and stared at her, as if through it.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel ill or anything.’

‘Of course not — why would you want to see a doctor if you were feeling ill, eh?’ He grinned and it was infectious. She grinned back, relaxing a tad.

‘Totally,’ she replied. ‘Why would anyone?’

‘Exactly! I only like to see patients who are feeling well! Who needs sick patients? They take up far too much time — and they reflect badly on me.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Always come and see me anytime you are feeling well, yes?’

She laughed. ‘It’s a deal!’

‘Right, well, nice to meet you, Freya!’ He feigned standing up to say goodbye, then sat down again, chuckling. ‘So, tell me?’

Now she got him! ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ve met this guy — that’s why I’ve moved down here — I’ve been off the pill for a while — but I’d like to go back on it again.’

There was a long silence. He peered at her and his demeanour seemed to have stiffened, and suddenly she felt a chill of unease. Had she touched some kind of nerve in him?

Then he smiled, a big, warm, friendly beam that lit up his entire countenance. ‘The pill? That’s all?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘You’re planning to have sex with this — guy ?’

‘Well, we are already having sex. But—’

He raised his hands in the air. ‘Beware! Too much information! You want the pill, I’m your dealer! No problem. You are a very delightful young lady. Anything you want, just come and see me. So, OK, let me take some details about you, then I’ll give you a check-up. Tell me first some of your medical history?’

She recounted, as best she could recall, her appendectomy at the age of thirteen, her broken shoulder from snowboarding at sixteen, her chlamydia at eighteen, and, blushing, her recurring thrush more recently.