Stuart Pawson - Deadly Friends

"Umm, well, I thought so, but perhaps it's all a bit too ambitious for someone with my little experience."

"Nonsense," I assured her. "You can do it. The only thing these so-called experts have is confidence."

"The problem is, he wants me to go up to London, first thing on Saturday, on the early train, so I wouldn't want to be too late."

"Oh. So do you want me to cancel the table?"

"No, of course not, as long as we are not too late."

"Do you want me to take you down?"

"That's kind of you, but I'm not sure when I will be coming back."

"Why? How long are you thinking of staying?"

"Only until Sunday or Monday."

"So where will you stay?"

"I'm not sure, at the moment. At Xav's, perhaps, or he'll find an hotel for me. He's paying my expenses and a fee."

There must have been something in the way I said: "Oh."

"Charles, what are you suggesting?" she demanded.

"Nothing. Nothing at all. I'm just missing you, Annabelle. Xav knows he's found someone special, and he's got me worried, that's all."

"Don't be silly, Charles," she replied. "I'll look forward to seeing you on Friday."

I put the phone down and prayed for the biggest blizzard to hit the North since the Great Ice Age. I had a sandwich banana, honey and a sprinkling of cocoa and caught up with the news on TV. They were having it bad down South, but they always are.

I took a shower and went to bed reasonably early. Then I remembered that I had no ironed shirts. I got up and hung a couple over the shower head, in the hope that the creases would drop out overnight. I dreamed about operating on Genghis to remove a piano from his brain, on the deck of an open boat with only an electric iron for a scalpel and big waves crashing over us.

"What have we got?" I asked. We were seating ourselves around my desk again. Nigel carefully lowered three steaming mugs and sat down.

"Custard creams," Sparky replied.

"Pass 'em over, then, please."

"Wait a minute," Nigel said. "Wait a minute. Where did that come from?"

Sparky followed his gaze to the wall behind my desk and smiled. Natasha had written: "To Charlie, with lots of love, Natasha Wilde', on her photograph, with four kisses, and I'd pinned her on the wall next to my new calendar from the Bamboo Curtain.

"She's dotted that last i in an unfortunate place," he observed.

"I hadn't noticed," I said.

"I take it you had a succesful meeting," Nigel declared.

"She's a very nice lady."

"Find anything useful," Sparky asked, 'apart from her telephone number and her favourite tipple?"

"Mmm. She confirmed that the doc was knocking somebody off at the clinic, presumably the registrar's wife that we already know about; about eighteen months ago he mysteriously stopped playing squash; and, sometime in the past, he's been accused of malpractice."

"Malpractice?" Nigel said. "What was that about?" "She didn't know.

Can you look into it, please? Try the

General Medical Council."

"Right. And what's so special about giving up squash?" "Nothing. She was just trying to be helpful. One minute he was a keen player, then he stopped, that's all."

"Perhaps he had a recurring injury. It happens all the "Yep."

Sparky chipped in with: "You said he was knocking someone off at the clinic' "Mmm."

"The registrar works at the General. Was this a different one?"

"Sugar! I don't know. I'm certain she said the clinic Maybe she meant the hospital. What's the difference between a clinic and a hospital?"

"I think your mind wasn't on the job," Sparky said "You could be right," I admitted. "Let's try to check it from this end. What did you two find?"

Nigel said the parents were bearing up remarkably well Doctoring was the family business they were both GPs He d come away with the names of a few friends and had promised to have a word with the coroner about releasing the body for a funeral.

"And at the hospital?" I asked, turning to Sparky "Nothing worthwhile. To be honest, there seems to have been a great deal of affection for the doctor, from both sexes. Everybody agrees that he was a fine doctor and a good bloke. He had his flings, but he was a gentleman "Sounds a bit like me," I said.

"Just what I thought, Charlie. So I collared the registrar and asked him if he knew that the doctor, or consultant, to be precise, had been shagging his wife."

"I hope you weren't so circumspect," I said. "The first rule of good interviewing is to be unambiguous."

"Well, actually, I told him that I'd heard rumours. He said he'd heard the same rumours, but as he and his good lady were leading separate lives and just keeping up appearances until the kids went to college, he wasn't bothered."

"Mmm. Interesting. Did you push it?"

"You bet. I asked him where he was on the night in question. He and his wife threw a dinner party for eight neighbours. It's something they do monthly, or thereabouts, rotating round each other's houses."

"Keeping up appearances."

"Quite. He's given me a list of names."

"Let's have 'em checked. Anything else, either of you?"

"Yes, there is," Nigel replied, blushing like a schoolboy about to present his parents with a favourable report. "I took Dr. Jordan's letters and cards to his parents, but copied most of it. His bank statement made interesting reading. Apart from his salaries there were deposits of three hundred, three hundred and fifty, and another three hundred, at monthly intervals. I checked his previous statements and it's been going on for nearly two years. The amounts vary, but it's usually three hundred, three hundred and fifty, or occasionally four hundred, at the end of the month."

"Maybe he does some other work," I suggested. "He could be on a retainer, or something." "And doesn't pay tax on it?" "How do you know he doesn't pay tax on it?"

"Because if he declared it it wouldn't come out at such a round figure."

I said: "I don't know who you've been mixing with, lately, Nigel, but you're developing a terribly suspicious mind."

"There was one exception. Last September the payment was missed, but there was a double payment in October. In the doctor's diary," he went on, "I came across an entry at the appropriate time that said: "AJKW not paid, ring him." That's all."

"So you reckon that these payments are coming from someone called AJKW."

"Yes."

"Any ideas who it is?"

"Yes," he declared with undisguised triumph.

"Go on."

"Last night, in the absence of a better offer, I took the telephone directory to bed with me."

"I have nights like that," Sparky interrupted.

"Shut up," I told him.

"I worked my way through the his and found an entry for A.J.K.

Weatherall. It only took a couple of minutes. It's got to be the same person. Odds of it not being are about equal to your chances of winning the lottery. And he's a chemist in Heckley, which clinches it, I'd say."

"You mean… a pharmacist chemist?"

"That's right."

"Sheest!" I sat back and whistled through my teeth.

Nigel bit into a custard cream and had a sip of his tea. I popped one in whole and took a swig. Sparky dunked.

When we'd swallowed the biscuits and digested the information, Sparky said: "So what do you reckon? They were scamming the NHS?"

Long time ago, when the Earth was young and sex came before marriage only in very cheap dictionaries, prescriptions were free and professional people were assumed to be honest. Things have changed since then. The price of a prescription is now often four or five times the cost of the medicine it procures. "Ah!" says the Health Minister, gleefully. "But sixty per cent of patients are exempt from paying the charges." They draw perverse satisfaction from the fact that most of the nation's sick fall below some arbitrary poverty level.