‘What circumstances?’ Bromley didn’t move.
‘Stephen and Laura are just tying up a few loose ends with Sergeant Kolla.’
‘Sergeant Kolla?’ Bromley repeated dumbly.
‘You remember her from the first investigation of Alex Petrou’s murder? I expect you know that I’m also with the police — the Metropolitan Police, Detective Chief Inspector.’ Brock showed him his warrant card.
‘What’s happened? Why are you here?’
‘We should probably wait until they can join us. Why don’t you sit down and have a cup of coffee? Not much fun being woken up like that in the middle of the night.’
Looking slightly disoriented, Bromley took the visitor’s seat Brock indicated, and accepted a cup of black coffee.
‘I don’t know where you keep the milk,’ Brock smiled.
‘Jay brings it for me fresh each day,’ he replied dumbly.
Brock nodded, sat back and sipped appreciatively at his cup. ‘Very nice, Ben. In fact the whole office is very nice. A centre of calm. I imagine you can really think in an office like this, unlike mine, which is always chaotic. I’d love to know how to get my desk as clean as this at the end of the day. I tell people that the only ones who can keep a clear desk are those who deal with simple problems, but I know I’m kidding myself. It requires discipline, I suppose. A tidy mind.’
‘What exactly are we waiting for?’ Bromley interjected.
‘They shouldn’t be too long. Please be patient.’ Brock smiled sympathetically. He continued to look appraisingly around the room, as if filling in time, and his eyes fixed on Bromley’s computer. ‘And a systematic mind. Dealing with information in a systematic way.’
Bromley saw where he was looking and his face darkened with suspicion. ‘Yes, well,’ he said sarcastically, ‘you’d know all about our computer system, wouldn’t you?’
Brock beamed. ‘That was embarrassing, Ben. I needed some information and I couldn’t see how else to get it.’
‘You could have tried asking.’
‘True. That’s probably what I should have done. But it concerned those special guests of yours — the Friends — what some of the patients call the “goats”. I thought you might feel too protective towards them to want to help me.’
Bromley said nothing.
‘Although I did get the impression that, even though you look after them, and bow and scrape when it’s necessary, you don’t really like them. Am I right?’
‘Bow and scrape!’ Bromley said indignantly.
‘Well, it’s a service industry, isn’t it? But they’re a toffee-nosed lot, aren’t they, your Friends? Public schoolboys to a man. Privileged southerners who’d only willingly travel north of Watford Gap if there was some salmon or grouse in the offing.’
‘Makes no difference to me, squire,’ Bromley said coolly. ‘I just get on with my job. You’d know more about that sort of thing, being a Cambridge man yourself. Dr Beamish-Newell tells me you’re both Cambridge men:
‘Yes,’ Brock nodded, ignoring the veiled contempt. ‘I went up from grammar school. I don’t know what it’s like now, but there were plenty of upper-class twits around then. I remember going into a pub one night, the Blue Boar it was, and two chinless wonders were ranting away at the bar. “I say,” one said, “I knocked a chappie off his bike with my sports car just now. A black man. He put out his hand to turn right, but it was dark, so of course I didn’t see it. Those chappies should be made to wear white gloves.” I swear that’s true, his exact words.’
But Bromley wasn’t buying any of it. ‘Is that a fact, David?’ he said, unimpressed. ‘It’s hard to credit. But I suppose we didn’t get too many viscounts at Burnley Tech, so I wouldn’t really know. I’ll leave that sort of thing to you and Dr Beamish-Newell.’
The sarcasm was like water off a duck’s back to Brock. ‘Now there’s another thing,’ he went on, ‘a name like that. What kind of person would give themselves an absurd double-barrelled handle like that? Anyone with a pretentious name like that wouldn’t survive five minutes at Burnley Tech, would they, Ben? And yet it seems to impress people down here.’
Bromley snorted and gave a crooked little grin. Before he could stop he found himself reciting the limerick he’d spent idle moments perfecting:
‘Said a brilliant young doctor from Poole,
Whose name was simply Steve Newell,
To get where the cream is,
I’d better add Beamish,
And make them all eat Squeamish-Gruel.’
Brock smiled appreciatively. ‘Still, despite the absence of viscounts in your formative years, you seem to have done very well. You’ve got a nice detached house near Redhill, I understand, and a charming family. Four daughters, is that right?’
Bromley looked suspiciously at Brock. He didn’t remember telling him that.
‘Are they at the pony stage? You’ll be up to your armpits in manure with four of them. They’ll be demanding a paddock and stables of their own. Your whole life will be spent mucking out. Or does your wife do that? She doesn’t work, does she? Paid work, I mean — she’ll have her hands full with the girls and the ponies.’
Bromley started to tell Brock to mind his own business, but the conversation took an abrupt turn.
‘What I’d like to know, Ben, is what you really thought of Alex Petrou. I’ve been having difficulty understanding what he was like. To begin with, people seemed to be telling me that he was charming and attractive, but then, after a while, I got another, darker side. How did you see him?’
Bromley squinted closely at the figure across the desk — his side of the desk — to see if this was on the level. Then he said carefully, ‘He was unusual. Not the type we usually get. Smoother, a bit of an operator. Good with the patients. He found it easy to establish a rapport with people. Interested in their gossip.’
‘Like a woman? You implied to Sergeant Kolla that there was something odd about his sexuality — that he was bisexual.’
‘I steer well clear of all that,’ Bromley said stoutly.
‘Do you, Ben? Well … And what about the dark side of his personality, were you aware of that?’
‘Can’t say I was, David. There was something … racy about him. Bit of a devil, I’d guess. Nothing sinister.’
‘Really? A devil …’ Brock was studying Bromley’s face closely as he replied, his mood suddenly serious. ‘So you saw him as an asset to the clinic?’
Bromley shrugged. ‘Sure. He was popular with the punters. That was good enough for me.’
‘No, there was more to it than that,’ Brock said flatly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Petrou could attract the punters all right, sniff out their predilections — he had a talent for it. He wasn’t just an asset, he was a resource. On his own he was merely an opportunist, didn’t really appreciate how things work, although he had a nice instinct. But to be really effective he needed a manager, someone to organize things for him, keep the Beamish-Newells off his back, line up the punters, give him advice, feed his ambition. He needed you, Ben. Together you created an alternative clinic within the alternative clinic — a neat idea. You had your own special patients and your own special programme, a bit more indulgent than Stanhope’s, and almost invisible inside the respectable setting it provided.
‘I’m not suggesting that you didn’t steer well clear of his sexuality. You must have been about the only one around here who wasn’t fascinated by it. Your interests were more practical. Where there’s muck there’s brass. The invisible clinic had its own fees and profit line and cash flow and investment portfolio too, didn’t it?’
Bromley half rose out of his seat in protest, but Brock waved him down. ‘I’m not much interested, really. I could turn it over to the Fraud Squad and they would get to the bottom of it. They know how to track down cash transactions. They don’t look for records that are there so much as those that aren’t, if you follow me — like looking for the invisible clinic. You know, you buy a pony for one of the girls, and there’s no record in your cheque or credit-card accounts, so where did the cash come from? It’s a tedious process looking for records that aren’t there. Very expensive and very intrusive. The only satisfaction is that we get you twice — once when we discover how you made the money, and then again when we hand you over to the Inland Revenue for tax evasion.