‘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.
‘Mr Somers?’
‘Who wants to know?’
It was a smartarse line from a second-rate American cop show. Gaddis almost laughed.
‘I was a friend of Charlotte Berg’s,’ he said. ‘My name is Sam Gaddis. I’m an academic. I wondered if you might have time for a quick chat?’
He had closed the door behind him as he asked the question and Somers looked grateful for the privacy. The mention of Charlotte’s name had caught him off-guard; there was perhaps some shameful or calculating element to their relationship which he was keen to obscure.
‘Was?’ Somers had noted the use of the past tense. He pulled himself up in his chair but did not stand to shake Gaddis’s hand, as if by doing so he might undermine an idea he possessed of his own innate authority. Gaddis noticed that his right hand was spinning a ballpoint pen nervously around the surface of his desk.
‘I’m afraid I have some bad news,’ he said.
‘And what’s that?’
The manner was artificially confident, even supercilious. Gaddis watched Somers’s face carefully.
‘Charlotte had a heart attack. Suddenly. Last week. I think you may have been one of the last people to see her alive.’
‘She what?’
The reaction was one of annoyance, rather than shock. Somers was looking at Gaddis in the way that you might look at a person who has just fired you.
‘She’s dead,’ Gaddis felt obliged to repeat, though he was angered by the callous response. ‘And she was a friend of mine.’
Somers stood up in the narrow office, walked past Gaddis and double-checked that the door was properly closed. A man with a secret. He carried with him a strange, mingled smell of cheap aftershave and hospital disinfectant.
‘And you’ve come to give me the three grand, have you?’ It was a completely unexpected remark. Why was Charlotte in debt to this prick by £3000? Gaddis frowned and said: ‘What’s that?’ as he took a small, disbelieving step backwards.
‘I said have you brought the three grand?’ Somers sat at the edge of his desk. ‘You say you were a friend of hers, she obviously told you about our arrangement or you wouldn’t be here. Were you working on the story together?’
‘What story?’ It was an instinctive tactic, a means of protecting his scoop, but Gaddis saw that it was the wrong move. Somers shot him a withering glance that developed into a smile which bared surprisingly polished teeth.
‘Probably best if you don’t play the innocent,’ he sneered. Two sheets of paper slid off the desk beside him, undermining the remark’s dramatic impact. Somers was obliged to stoop down and pick them up as they floated to the ground.
‘Nobody’s playing the innocent, Calvin. I’m just trying to ascertain who you are and what your relationship was with my friend. If it helps, I can tell you that I’m a senior lecturer in Russian History at UCL. In other words, I am not a journalist. I’m just an interested party. I am not a threat to you.’
‘Who said anything about a threat?’
Somers was back in his chair again, swivelling, trying to regain control. Gaddis saw now that this embittered, hostile man had probably felt threatened for most of his adult life; men like Calvin Somers could not afford to display a moment’s self-doubt. The room had grown hot, central heating pumping out of a radiator beneath a locked window. Gaddis removed his jacket and hooked it on the door.
‘Let’s start again,’ he said. He was used to awkward conversations in cramped rooms. Students complaining. Students crying. Every week at UCL brought a fresh crisis