At Hampstead station he queued behind a backpacking German tourist and placed the Oyster on a reader at the ticket machine. What he saw intrigued him. The same five journeys, there and back, over a period of fifteen days, from Finchley Road station, which was a fifteen-minute walk from Charlotte’s house, to Rickmansworth, in the suburbs of northwest London. He found a Tube map and traced the simple journey north on the Metropolitan line. It would have taken about forty minutes. For some reason, this small triumph of amateur detection was enough to persuade him not to buy the cigarettes and Gaddis returned to the house with a renewed sense of purpose.
He took the receipts from the envelope a second time, pouring them on to the kitchen table: WH Smith’s, Daunt Books, Transport for London. Some writing caught his eye: scrawled on the back of two receipts which were from the same pub in Chorleywood, Charlotte had written: Lunch C Somers. The dates matched the days on which she had travelled north from Finchley. Gaddis knew that Chorleywood and Rickmansworth were no more than a couple of miles apart. He went back outside and returned to the computer, running a search for the name ‘Somers’. Nothing came up. Just the same black hole of false leads and dead ends which had wiped out his morning.
Perhaps she had made telephone calls to a landline in the Rickmansworth area? Gaddis typed ‘Dialling code for Rickmansworth’ into Google and wrote down the number: 01923. The same prefix was listed for Chorleywood. He then checked the results against an itemized phone bill which he had discovered while drinking a cup of coffee at her desk almost five hours earlier. Sure enough, in the three weeks of her journeys from Finchley, Charlotte had made half a dozen calls to the same 01923 number. Gaddis took his own phone from the pocket of his coat and dialled it.
A woman answered, bored to the point of despair.
‘Mount Vernon Hospital.’
Gaddis said ‘Hello?’ because he was unsure precisely what she had said and wanted it repeated.
‘ Yes,’ she said, sounding impatient. ‘Mount Vernon Hospital.’
He scribbled the name down. ‘Please. Yes. I’m looking for a patient of yours. Thomas Neame. Would it be possible to speak to him?’
The line went dead. Gaddis assumed that he was being connected to a separate part of the hospital. If Neame answered, what the hell was he going to say? He hadn’t thought things through. He couldn’t even be sure that the old man would know what had happened to Charlotte. He would have to tell him about her heart attack and then somehow explain his interest in Edward Crane.
‘Sir?’ It was the receptionist again. Her tone was fractionally less hostile. ‘We don’t have a patient of that name here.’
There didn’t seem to be any future in asking to check the spelling of ‘Neame’. Nor could he enquire about Somers. The receptionist might smell a rat. Instead Gaddis thanked her, hung up and called Paul at work.
‘Do you have a relative who works at the Mount Vernon Hospital in Rickmansworth?’
‘Come again?’
‘Rickmansworth. Chorleywood. Hertfordshire suburbs.’
‘Never been there in my life.’
‘What about Charlotte? Could she have had a relative up there or a friend that she was visiting?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
Somers was obviously the key. But was he a patient at the hospital or a member of staff? Gaddis redialled Mount Vernon using the phone in the house and was put through to a different receptionist.
‘Could I speak to Doctor Somers please?’
‘ Doctor Somers?’
It was the wrong call. Somers was a patient, a porter, a nurse.
‘Sorry…’
‘You mean Calvin?’
The Christian name was a lucky break. ‘Yes.’
‘Calvin’s not a doctor.’
‘Of course not. Did I say that? I wasn’t concentr-’
‘He’s a Senior Nurse in Michael Sobel.’ Gaddis scrawled down Michael Sobel. ‘He’s not due back on shift until the morning. Is there anything else? Would you like to leave a message for him?’
‘No, no message.’
Gaddis replaced the receiver. He pulled up Google on Charlotte’s computer. Michael Sobel was the name of a new cancer treatment centre at the Mount Vernon. He would go there in the morning. If he could find Somers on shift, he might be able to find out why Charlotte Berg kept taking him out to lunch in the days leading up to her death. That information, at the very least, would take him a step closer to Edward Crane.
Chapter 8
The Mount Vernon Hospital was only half an hour by car from Gaddis’s house in west London, but he took the Tube in order to recreate, largely for sentimental reasons, the journey on the Metropolitan line which Charlotte had taken from Finchley Road to Rickmansworth in the last week of her life.
These were the suburbs of his childhood, red-brick, post-war houses of indistinct character with gardens just large enough to play a game of Swingball or French cricket. Gaddis remembered his racquet-wielding father launching a tennis ball into near-orbit one hot summer afternoon, a yellow dot disappearing towards the sun. The train passed through Harrow, Pinner, Northwood Hills, the indifferent streets and parks of outer London, starved of sunlight. The hospital itself, far from being the gleaming twenty-first-century new-build of Gaddis’s imagination, was a vaguely sinister, neo-Gothic mansion with a gabled roof and views across the Hertfordshire countryside. It looked like the sort of place that a soldier might have gone to recuperate in the aftermath of World War II; he could picture starchy nurses attending to men in wheel-chairs, veterans and their visitors spread out across the spacious lawn like guests at a garden party.
Gaddis had taken a taxi from Rickmansworth station and was deposited at the hospital’s main reception, located in a modern building a few hundred metres east of the mansion. He followed the signs to the Michael Sobel Centre and drifted around the ground floor until a female doctor, no older than most of his students, saw that Gaddis was lost, offered him an accommodating smile and asked if she could ‘help in any way’.
‘I’m looking for one of the nurses here. Calvin.’ He had assumed that the use of Somers’s Christian name might generate an effect of familiarity. ‘Is he around?’
The doctor was wearing a stethoscope around her neck, like a gesture to Central Casting. She took a good long look at his shoes. Gaddis never gave much thought to his appearance and wondered what it was that people thought they could discern from analysing a stranger’s footwear. Today, he was wearing a pair of scuffed desert boots. In the eyes of a pretty twenty-five-year-old doctor, was that a good or a bad thing?
‘Calvin? Sure,’ she said, her face suddenly opening up to him. It was as if he had passed some unspecified test. ‘I’ve seen him around this morning. He has an office on the second floor, just beyond Pathology. Do you know it?’
‘It’s my first time,’ Gaddis replied. He was not a natural liar and there seemed no point in misleading her. The doctor duly gave him directions, all the while touching her stethoscope. Two minutes later, Gaddis was standing at the door of Somers’s office, knocking on chipped paint.
‘Enter.’
The voice was reedy and slightly strangulated. Gaddis put an age and appearance to it before he had even turned the handle. Sure enough, Calvin Somers was mid-forties, slightly built, with the stubborn, defensive features of a man who has spent the bulk of his life wrestling a corrosive insecurity. He was wearing a pale green nurse’s uniform and there was gel in his thinning black hair. Sam Gaddis had good instincts about people and he disliked Calvin Somers on sight.