The Surgeon's Case Read online

  “I thought it was all electronic now,” I said.

  He snorted. “Far from it.”

  “So she took the briefcase with what aim, do you think?”

  He folded his arms and sat back. A couple of young women in suits were staring at our table but I was acutely aware that I was invisible to them.

  “Maybe she thought it had money in it. I don’t know. I do need them back, though.” It didn’t seem to me that missing medical records was that embarrassing, but perhaps to someone with his public profile it was a potential tabloid headline that he could do without. Maybe he just needed to check the cut of my jib before divulging himself; private investigators had been known to work for tabloid newspapers. I decided I’d give him the benefit of the doubt on the matter. He checked his watch and asked, “So, do you think you can find her?”

  “Maybe, although there isn’t a lot to go on. Why did she leave, do you think? Did you or your wife have a disagreement with her?”

  He looked surprised – or feigned it – and shook his head.

  “If I do take this on I’ll need to talk to your wife. I’m assuming, given your schedule, that she deals with Aurora on a day-to-day basis?”

  “Yes.”

  “When can I speak to her?”

  He hesitated before saying, “She’s away. Why not see what you can find out and come to the house on Monday, say five o’clock?” He wrote something on a card with a fountain pen and handed it to me. “Our address.” I glanced at it. An address in the village of Fulbourn. I pocketed it as he stood up. I stood up too. I supposed I’d just been hired.

  I gestured at the envelope. “Is there a photo in there?”

  He nodded.

  “We should discuss my fees and expenses. I’ll draw up a contract and—”

  He pulled a face and waved his hand dismissively. “Let’s keep it casual for the moment. There’s three hundred in the envelope to get you started – call it a retainer. The rest we can sort out. With any luck I’ll only have to pay you for the next couple of days anyway.” He paused. “If you do find her, don’t approach her yourself – she might be a little skittish. Just let me know. My medical secretary’s number is on the card.” We shook hands. He smoothed his hair as he walked off, nodding at the women who’d been staring at us, or rather him.

  “I’m sure that was him. Did you see?” one of them said.

  Feeling cheapened by the cash in the envelope, which was perhaps the intention, I picked it up and went to the bar to order a beer but remembered how much Galbraith had paid for the coffees. It wasn’t my type of place anyway.

  3

  AT HOME I CHANGED OUT OF MY SUIT AND SUPPLEMENTED THE beer I’d had in the pub on the way back with a bottle from the fridge. In the back garden I enjoyed the tangle of brambles and weeds that used to be a garden when my parents had owned the house. My mother would be horrified at its state, but after her death and my father’s incarceration in a care home my wife Olivia did all the gardening. But since she’d left with a woman from her book group for a Greek island (not Lesbos, but it might as well have been), nature had taken over.

  Overwhelmed with sudden tiredness I sat on a rotting bench and opened the envelope Bill Galbraith had given me. Aside from the three hundred pounds, it contained a folded sheet with a picture – a photocopy of a passport page to be exact. The passport was for one Aurora de la Cruz, a Filipino national who looked rather studious as she stared unsmiling at the camera. Born in Manila in August 1982, her photo was four years old, judging by the issue date of her passport, which would expire next year.

  The doorbell rang. I let Linda in. Still in her dark suit from the funeral, she was hot and sweaty and had stale breath, but I was pleased to see her. She pushed past me with a plastic bag of groceries into the kitchen. I closed the door and followed. She was unloading a glistening bottle of white wine, a bag of salad and a couple of supermarket pizzas.

  “Put the oven on, will you, I’m going to jump in the shower.” Following her instruction I took the pizzas out of their cardboard boxes and plastic wrapping and unbagged the salad into a bowl. I could hear Linda make oohing and aahing noises as she enjoyed her shower.

  I’d met Linda via her husband, who hired me to follow her. At the time he was a Labour member of the city council and had come to see me, convinced she was having an affair. I’d dutifully followed her around town and into London but all I discovered was that she was vivacious and friendly, the very things, in my experience, that men found attractive in a woman until that woman became their main squeeze and they realised other men found them attractive as well. He became psychopathically jealous, unable to deal with the fact that she spoke to other men and sometimes even smiled at them.

  Somehow she found out that he’d had her followed and dumped him pronto, but he wouldn’t let her go that easy. She’d acquired my details from him and came to see me about his continued harassment, arguing that, because I was partly responsible for her predicament, I should speak to him. I refused; in my experience of these matters, the only thing that would work was a complete break. He was calling her several times a day and she would ignore him for a few days but then take a call in order to plead with him to stop. Or he would turn up at her work and she would agree to talk to avoid a scene. I told her to move, preferably to another city, but she didn’t see why she should. Instead she moved within Cambridge, and changed jobs, telling nobody from work where she’d gone. I advised her to get another mobile phone, give the new number to everyone she trusted, but to keep the existing one switched off just to record voicemail messages from him, which she should never respond to under any circumstances. I hoped that her refusal to respond to his calls would send a clear message to him, which would, in the majority of cases, be the end of it. Just one returned call, even if it was a plea to be left alone, would give him the contact he craved. A visit by me would be a visit by proxy, and would just feed his febrile imagination with ideas about our relationship. Once a week Linda and I got together and monitored any messages on her old phone, mainly to see if he was one of the minority that didn’t give up, who became threatening and potentially violent. But his calls diminished over time then stopped, and when I looked into it I discovered that he had moved to London, no doubt to disturb another hapless woman suckered by the initial and pleasing over-attentiveness that harassers initially exhibit.

  When Linda stopped being a client I realised I missed our weekly get-togethers and we formed a liaison of sorts which settled into her coming round to mine or us going to the cinema. I have never been to her place, nor have I met any of her friends – with whom she spends a lot of time – but it doesn’t really bother me, I don’t think. It is, as they say, what it is.

  She came down wearing one of my T-shirts and not much else as far as I could tell, clutching her phone, which rarely left her person. The smell of the pizzas filled the kitchen. I poured her some cold white wine and doused the salad with dressing from a bottle in the fridge. She looked up from her phone, putting it aside.

  “How are you doing, Georgie?”

  “I’m OK.” Like Sandra, she didn’t look convinced.

  “Sorry I rushed off this morning after the funeral.”

  “You’re here now, for which I’m grateful.”

  She smiled and sipped her wine while I took the pizzas from the oven.

  “What’s the story with your dead girl?” I asked, slicing the pizza.

  “Could be juicy. She was found at Byron’s Pool?”

  “I know, on the Grantchester Road.”

  “Yes. Dumped by the side of the car park, in some long grass.”

  “How old?”

  “They’re not sure yet. They’ve not even ID’d the poor kid and until any family are told we can’t publish anything.” She looked at me. “Detective Inspector Vicky Stubbing is leading the case.”

  I concentrated on trying to keep my slice of pizza from shedding its topping before it reached my mouth while she peered at me.

>   “Don’t you know Vicky Stubbing?” she asked. I did indeed know Stubbing – we’d become acquainted on that unpleasant business with the bursar’s wife at Morley College. I’d sworn off taking cases related to the university after that, and thus far had been successful. I didn’t tell Linda that I’d once shared a condom with Stubbing but the sordid circumstances of that desperate liaison were such that relating it would take longer than the encounter itself.

  “Our paths have crossed, as you might expect.”

  “She can be a cold fish.”

  “She’s OK once you break the ice,” I said, not sure why I was defending her.

  “Must have taken a sledgehammer to get through that,” she said, studying me. I remained impassive. Linda smiled. “I like that you’re not a kiss-and-tell kind of guy, Georgie.”

  “So do you think this is the big one?” I asked, steering the topic onto safer ground. Linda was convinced that because she was forty-something and still worked on a provincial newspaper, her only chance at moving up in the world (in other words, joining a national paper based in London) meant getting hold of a big fat juicy story. Not an everyday catch in Cambridge.

  “Time will tell. It might be an accident, of course. She may just have drowned.” She drained her glass. “Jesus, if people could hear us they’d think we were ghouls.”

  “We both make our living off other people’s misery, so I suppose we are ghouls.”

  “That’s a bit dark. If that is the case, then so are doctors.”

  “Doctors try to alleviate misery; we often make it worse.”

  “Jesus, if you’re going to be a miserable bastard, Georgie, I’ll take my joie de vivre elsewhere.” She cleared the plates and I finished my beer. She stood at the sink and ran some hot water. My dad used to wash up, every night. This house was pretty much as my parents had kept it, untouched from the fifties, and a constant reminder of them. I thought about selling it, making a fresh start. In today’s market and in this gentrified area I would make a small fortune. I could buy a nice apartment overlooking Parker’s Piece, maybe even a small sports car like Galbraith’s. No, I would never buy a sports car.

  I watched Linda at the sink before getting up to stand behind her, putting my hands on her waist.

  “Are you wearing my underwear as well as my shirt?” I asked.

  “Check for yourself,” she said, squeezing washing-up liquid into the water. I moved my hands over her behind, and could find no evidence of underwear.

  “Hello, I think I’ve just found your joie de vivre,” I whispered into her ear.

  4

  “SO WHAT WE GOT?” SANDRA ASKED ME IN THE OFFICE THURSDAY morning. It was a beautiful day, and going to be another hot one for June, but I was feeling out of sorts after a restless night. I’d dreamt about the funeral, except in the dream the crematorium was full of people, and when the time came for the casket to disappear it rolled the other way instead and crashed onto the floor where it continued to move towards the mourners who screamed and panicked and were climbing over each other to escape. I tried to stop the coffin but was carried along, crashing through people towards the exit. I made no efforts to analyse the dream, because trying to do so would lead nowhere fast.

  “Hello, anyone there?” Sandra waved at me.

  “Sorry.” I sat up. “We have a missing person. Or more accurately, a person who wants to be missing. Her employers say she stole from them.” I showed her the sheet Galbraith had given me, with the photo of the passport page.

  “Aurora de la Cruz,” Sandra mouthed, looking at it. “What did she do? I mean, as a job.”

  “He called her a domestic, so cooking and cleaning, I’m guessing.”

  “A nanny?”

  “There was no mention of kids.”

  “What did she take?”

  “A briefcase containing patients’ notes apparently.”

  “Not much of a haul. Did you meet the wife?” Sandra asked, handing me the sheet and going to her computer. “Was she gorgeous?”

  “What are you on about?”

  “I did a bit more digging after I rang you yesterday. The wife was a beauty queen, once upon a time,” she said, pointing at her screen. “Miss Russia 1995.” I stepped behind Sandra’s desk to have a look at a picture of her. She was stunning despite over-the-top makeup and elaborately coiffed hair.

  “I’m seeing her Monday, I think.”

  “Bet you’re looking forward to it now.”

  “So what has she been up to since?” I asked, moving to my own desk.

  “Advertising deals, perfume, jewellery, that sort of thing. Did a business degree after winning the beauty contest, then moved to the Persian Gulf where she set up a business and met the dashing Dr Galbraith. What’s he like, in the flesh?”

  “He’s aged well. I’ll give him that. A little too good-looking for my tastes.”

  “He looks yummy on TV. So, any ideas on where to start?”

  I picked up Aurora’s picture and looked at it, in case it should provide some insight. None was forthcoming. I put my feet up on the desk to improve blood flow to the brain.

  “So, this is what I’m thinking,” Sandra was saying. “This Aurora, does she have money?”

  “Not a penny. No credit card, nothing.”

  “So if she’s still in Cambridge then she will have to be working. Either that or she’s shacked up with someone.”

  “But why did she take the briefcase?”

  She ignored me and ploughed on. “So, going with the fact that she is some sort of domestic then she’ll be looking for a cleaning job,” she said.

  “Anyone hiring a cleaner would probably want a reference, which in her present circumstances would be difficult,” I said.

  “Exactly, so she’d have to do something off the books, or cash-in-hand…”

  “But where would she go? Who would she go to? Where would you go if in a foreign country and in trouble?” I asked.

  “The embassy I suppose.”

  “Not if you’ve stolen something from your employer.”

  “OK, then to someone I knew, someone I’d built a relationship with,” she said.

  “She didn’t know anyone, according to Galbraith. She hardly went out.”

  “Then you go to your own, to someone who at the very least speaks your language.”

  “Exactly. We need to find the Filipino community in Cambridge.”

  “Is there a Filipino community in Cambridge?”

  I took my feet off the desk as the blood had suddenly rushed to my head.

  “Which organisation, in Cambridge, is the biggest employer of workers actively recruited from abroad?” I asked.

  I let her think for a moment until she clicked her fingers. “Addenbrooke’s Hospital, of course. Nurses, technicians; I remember seeing something about them recruiting from the Philippines in the paper. Haven’t you got a friend who works there, a porter or something?”

  “I’m way ahead of you,” I said, picking up the phone and dialling Kamal’s mobile number. Sandra got up, picked up her mug and then mine which she waved at me questioningly. I didn’t have time to decline her coffee as Kamal’s phone went to his annoying voicemail message: “You’re better off texting if you want a quick response.” Idiot. He worked funny shifts at Addenbrooke’s, fitting them in around his writing, so he could be either at work or asleep.

  I switched on the new office mobile which had two SIM cards in it, one with a number we gave to clients, the other my personal number, something I was still getting used to having. Using my number I proceeded to tap out a message to Kamal, saying that I wanted to meet up and pick his brains. Sandra came back with coffee. Her coffee-making followed a path of least resistance that led nowhere particularly good. I suffered a few sips to avoid giving offence then stood up.

  “I’m going to see what’s up with my car. The garage aren’t answering my calls.”

  Instead, I walked up Lensfield Road and turned right at the Catholic church on the corner and
as soon as I was outside Antonio’s I stepped in for a proper coffee. Unfortunately young people – bearded males and women with androgynous haircuts – had cottoned on to the fact that Antonio’s was an indie coffee shop and had occupied it, tapping at expensive laptops or pretending to read battered Penguin classics. I had advised Antonio to turn off the free Wi-Fi to get rid of these posers.

  “Adapt or die, George,” he’d said. “Like you, I have to make a living.” Which explained the unreasonable hike in prices and the new decor and, to my mind worst of all, an actual menu which proclaimed Antonio’s Italian credentials and therefore his innate mastery of all things coffee related. I was disappointed in him, but still I came.

  I nodded at Antonio as I entered and he handed me the Cambridge Argus from behind the counter. I managed to find a seat among the hipsters as they hunched over their laptops and iPads. Waiting for my usual, I calculated that a simultaneous raid of coffee shops in central Cambridge would yield a lucrative haul of high-end computer equipment. You could clear ten grand in this place alone.

  The Argus had an article about the ongoing Cambridge punt wars. Rival companies were flooding the town with young, good-looking touts, male and female, all trying to convince the same tourists that they should spend a small fortune on a punt tour of the colleges with a historically dubious commentary from a clueless guide. Sandra’s son Jason was earning extra cash doing it. Scudamore’s were the top player in town but smaller enterprises sprung up every summer. If you had the capital outlay for a couple of punts, and recruited students to do the touting and punting, it was potentially a good little earner. Competition was fierce; one punt was found sawn in half at the start of the season.

  The mobile chirped and I picked it up to read a message from Kamal – he happened to be free now and could meet me at Antonio’s. I replied to tell him I was already here and asked what he wanted to drink. After placing his order I read some more newspaper and watched the other customers. They seemed oblivious to anyone else, each wrapped in their own world. Two men sat opposite each other, looking at their phones, occasionally talking without looking up.