And he wasn’t visiting Edward. Edward was a Quaker.
Jennifer dropped the phone and sprang to her feet.
Edward’s eyes were heavy, but he forced himself to stay awake. He wanted to hang on until one o’clock so that he could ask Jennifer if an email had arrived with photos of the baby and Melanie. He wished he could tell Edith. Funny how much he missed her. That story of hers – he couldn’t quite understand how he had let himself get so carried away by it. Perhaps he had been groping for a reason for her death, unwilling to believe that she had simply disappeared, given him the slip, pulled off the vanishing act he was so shortly to pull off himself.
Just for a moment he had the feeling that she was somewhere close by. He seemed to catch a whiff of her perfume.
When the man in the clerical collar appeared in the doorway, Edward’s first thought was that he had come to the wrong room.
His second thought as the man closed the door behind him was that he had done a good job of updating the photo, but he couldn’t possibly have guessed about the beard.
His third was that he wouldn’t be seeing Laura after all, because among the things he had knocked off the bedside table was the emergency buzzer.
Jennifer punched the panic button to summon help.
Nurses aren’t supposed to run, and Jennifer was a big woman, but she flew down that corridor.
She reached the room in time to see the man standing by Edward’s bed.
Light glinted on a hypodermic.
Another moment and she flung her arms round him from the back. She squeezed. He struggled, but years of manhandling toddlers at home and lifting patients at work had given her arms like steel hawsers. He didn’t stand a chance.
The hypodermic went clattering to the floor.
Then Paul, the burliest of the hospice nurses and an ex-soldier, appeared in the doorway and it was all over.
“Just a black shirt and strip of plastic cut from a bottle of washing-up liquid,” Edward marvelled for at least the tenth time.
Jennifer nodded. “That was all it took. Dressed like that he could walk into any hospice – or any hospital ward – claim to be visiting a parishioner and no one would bat an eyelid.”
It was nearly the end of Jennifer’s shift on the following night and she hadn’t been able to resist popping in to talk it over one more time. It was as if she needed to go over and over it again to convince herself that it really had happened.
“Only sorry I won’t be here to follow the trial,” Edward said with an effort. “But it’s clear enough what happened.”
“His bad luck that Edith had the same rare cancer that he’d made his speciality, and consulted him privately.”
“Johnson’s such a common name – no wonder he didn’t make the connection.”
“But she did. I wonder if she really had anything on him. She certainly made him think she had.”
“And that she’d shared it with someone in the hospice.”
Edward closed his eyes. He claimed that the excitement had given him a new lease of life. Jennifer wasn’t so sure. The disease was progressing fast now. He was too weak to sit up and his face was very pale against the pillow. She wondered if he would be alive when she returned in the evening. She hoped so. She’d like to be there at the end and she wanted to meet Laura.
Her eyes strayed to the colour printout of a beaming young woman with hair plastered to her sweaty forehead. She was cradling a tiny baby with a face like a crumpled rosebud.
She patted Edward’s hand and was getting up to leave when she saw that he had opened his eyes. He was gazing past her into the corridor.
She turned her head and saw a handsome middle-aged woman approaching.
“Laura,” Edward murmured. “You’re here.”
“Dad! I hired a car at the airport.”
“This is Jennifer.”
The two women clasped hands as they passed in the doorway. Laura gave a smile of recognition that made her look very like her father.
Jennifer closed the door behind her and went to get a Do Not Disturb sign.
No one would be needed here for a while.
THE BETRAYED by Roger Busby
“IT’S IMPOSSIBLE,” DENNIS Jewel said, “even if you’d got a case of JD tucked under your arm there, I’d be telling you the same thing.”
Mark Fletcher placed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 he had brought along as a sweetener on the desk between them. “Dennis,” he said, “what say you lock the door there, we pull a couple of glasses out of your bottom drawer, and we sip a little of this amber nectar and see if you don’t change your mind?”
“There’s no way I’m going to do that,” Jewel replied, “not while we’ve got an operation running. You think I can conjure blokes up out of the air or something? I’m not a bloody magician, Fletch.”
Fletcher sighed. He’d come to the Borough for a favour and he’d expected to have to haggle, but here was Jewel sitting on his backside just acting stubborn. “What operation trumps a murder?”
“Zatopek. You know, the lorry hijacking thing.”
“Zatopek?”
“Don’t you start.” Jewel took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and glanced wistfully at the image of a rotting lung on the packet. The only place he could light up these days was skulking in the station yard with the last of the diehards. “Some comedian up at the dream factory came up with that stupid name, something about it’s got to run the distance.”
“Christ,” Fletcher said. “Now I’ve heard everything.”
“Well, it don’t change a thing,” Jewel insisted, turning the cigarette packet over in his hand. “I’m committed a hundred per cent, and if they get wind up the road that I’m even thinking of loaning blokes to you on the old pals act, they’re going to have my balls. It’s as simple as that.”
Mark Fletcher regarded his friend for a moment as he marshalled his thoughts for a new gambit. Jewel was a heavily built man, solid with beefy shoulders which bulged under his shirt. He had a head of tight grey curls and his face wore a permanently perplexed expression. They were the same rank, detective chief inspector, only Jewel was a guv’nor on the Borough-wide CID under the wing of the Metropolitan Police Major Crime Directorate, with his own complement of detectives. He took his orders from New Scotland Yard. Normally the Borough would be only too happy to oblige on tricky investigations which stretched the limited resources of the Divisional CID, but now that Fletcher wanted his help here was his old oppo bellyaching about some Zatopek nonsense.
“Look, Dennis, it’s not like I’m asking for the earth, just a couple of decent blokes would do. You know I wouldn’t come begging if I wasn’t really up against it. I’ve got the big bin murder running away with me and the guv’nor already shouting the odds on overtime.”
“Yeah, I see your problem, Fletch,” Jewel agreed. “Sounds like you’ve got dead meat there all right. Not many like that get cleared these days.”
“That’s what I like about you, Dennis, always the optimist.”
“Well, you’ve got to be a realist sometimes,” Jewel said. “Sounds like it’s stacked against you. If I was you, Fletch, I’d think seriously about coasting and leave those eager beavers up at dream factory to take the shit when it all hits the fan.”
“Come off it,” Fletcher said. “You never took a soft option in your life, and I’m the same. We’re just a pair of thick-skinned Ds at heart who happen to think clearing crime still matters, particularly a swine like this one. That’s what I pin my reputation on, not ducking and diving and playing politics. And don’t try to kid me you’re not the same.”