The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Part 41

"Neither did I. I mean, how does a registrar know somebody's name when he walks into her office? But it was more than that. Her tone ... It was like she was meeting an old friend." Polly gave a little nod of punctuation.

"Is there some reason they shouldn't be friends?"

"She's, like, fifty and talks posh. Anyway, he says they're not."

"Or mightn't she have been a patient or visitor to the hospital and got to know him as a nurse?"

"He says no to that too."

"So how did he explain her greeting?"

"He just laughed and said it was nothing. He said that she knew his name because he'd rung her to make our appointment to go in. He said that using people's first names must be the way she puts people at their ease."

"And you didn't think that was a reasonable explanation?"

"She didn't know my name. She didn't put me at my ease. With me she was more a stuck-up cow."

OK ... "And ...?"

"I'm a legal secretary, Mr Lunghi. I've done the job for seven years and we get cases that you wouldn't believe. And I have a good sense of when things are right and when they're not. And this is not right. That 'h.e.l.lo Jack' was the 'h.e.l.lo, Jack' of someone who knew him. There's nothing wrong with that but then he denied it, and now he won't even talk about it. And it's hanging over me like a Sword of Damocles, if you know what I mean. There's something going on, Mr Lunghi. I just know there is."

"You mean between Jack and the registrar?"

"Not an affair. But they were conspiratorial. That's the word. Conspiratorial. Even after the 'h.e.l.lo, Jack' I saw little looks between them. I'm not a genius or anything I've never had to be. But my instinct says that something's wrong. And the last thing I want to do is marry a man, have children with a man, who is the wrong man."

"Of course not."

"Maybe the very fact he's being evasive should be enough for me to break it off," she said. "But I love him. I love him." And then the dam burst. Polly started to cry.

"I bet she's a babe," Rosetta said at the kitchen table that evening.

"Don't be silly," Salvatore said to his sister. But he felt his face flush. Good thing the kitchen was hot from cooking.

"It's the vacant look on your face when you talk about her," Rosetta said. "I've seen it before. Do you see it, Angelo? Gina?"

Angelo said nothing. Gina said, "See what?"

"That Sally's smitten with this Polly woman." Rosetta turned back to her elder brother. "But calling a marriage off because the registrar greeted her fiance by name? How flaky is that?"

Unmarried not even engaged recently Rosetta was eager, even desperate, to find Mr Right. To put a wedding in doubt because of a greeting was an alien concept.

"Polly's instincts tell her something's wrong," Salvatore said. "Pa.s.s the gnocchi, please."

Rosetta and Mama had pitched in to prepare food for everyone but because teenagers Marie and David were out, the meal was adults-only. The special circ.u.mstance was the return of star witnesses Angelo and Gina from Crown Court in Bristol.

However, neither witness felt celebratory. "We're shattered," Angelo declared as they arrived at the table.

"Shattered?" the Old Man said. "Shattered?"

"Like panes of gla.s.s, Papa," Gina said. "We're in bits."

The Old Man picked up a piece of bread. "Shattered? It sounds ... excremental. Shattered. Doubly excremental. Huh! There's more b.u.t.ter?"

"But still you testified?" Mama refilled Gina's wine gla.s.s and ignored her husband's request for his own good.

"We began our testimonies," Angelo said. "It's complicated, this fraud. We're testifying bit by bit rather than giving all our testimony at once."

"But you two will make it clear as gla.s.s for them." Mama refilled her younger son's wine gla.s.s. "Until you shatter, of course."

"Shat-tered," the Old Man said quietly. He held his gla.s.s out too.

"So this Polly," Rosetta said, "she thinks her fiance is carrying on with the registrar?"

"Only that they were conspiratorial. But it's destroying her that she doesn't know what they're conspiring about," Salvatore said.

"You took the case?"

"Of course. They hire us, we do the job."

"She pays, this Polly?" the Old Man asked.

"She paid a retainer, Papa. She works for lawyers, so she knows how it all goes."

"Which lawyers?"

"Baum and Carteret."

"Ah." An established firm the Lunghis had often been employed by. "It explains how she knows to come to us."

Salvatore turned to Gina. "The new case does mean that I'll be mostly out of the office tomorrow."

"I can cover it," Rosetta said quickly. She and Gina glanced rapidly at the Old Man who was drinking.

He saw the glances but didn't understand them. "What?"

Mama did. She said, "Where did you say Marie and David are tonight?" intentionally changing the subject. Everyone knew that putting the Old Man at the end of the agency telephone for a day was like rolling dice. You couldn't be sure what he'd do.

"They're at the films," Gina said.

"Oh, isn't that nice," Mama said.

"Not together, Mama. Not the same film. That would be far too easy."

"On a school night?" Rosetta asked.

"They swore they've done their homework. Marie has lines to learn for the play she's in, but that's really her business." Gina shrugged. Both children were responsible students, although with very different interests and talents. Marie was dramatic and arty. David was scientific and mathematical. But their parents cut them both some slack. So many teenaged children were much worse.

Rosetta said, "Where will you start with Polly's Jack, Sal?"

"A registrar does more than marriages," the Old Man said.

"True," Salvatore said.

"Deaths and births as well. Maybe this Jack comes in with all his babies."

"Maybe, Papa," Salvatore said, "but I'm going to start by checking out where he works and where he lives."

"What's his job?"

"He's a nurse."

"A nurse?"

"Although he went to university and read Spanish," Salvatore said. "Polly says he didn't know what to do after university so he got a care job and one thing led to another."

"A nurse, he is?" the Old Man said. "Helpful to people, if he isn't using it to kill them instead." The table went quiet. "What?" He looked around. "You think I'm foolish now? Nurses, doctors, they know things."

"No one thinks you're foolish, Papa," Gina said.

"Then why don't they ask me to cover their telephone while our Salvatore goes out to hunt for this fiance's conspiracy?" The Old Man sipped from his wine. "Huh!"

Years of working cases in Bath had provided the family with many friendly contacts in the Royal United Hospital. Unfortunately the same years had seen most of those contacts move on or retire.

When he began work in the morning Salvatore could not call on a single hospital nurse for information. However an administrative secretary was on the family's unofficial list of informants and Salvatore's call intrigued Dorothy Simbals sufficiently for her to agree to a coffee break in the large cafe area by the main entrance.

There was one small problem. Salvatore had never met her. "But you wear a name tag, right?"

"And you're happy to walk around a large room looking at every woman's chest?"

"Happy to have an excuse," Salvatore said.

"Even so ... Why don't you carry ... a magnifying gla.s.s. I'll recognize you as a detective by that."

"I could wear a geranium in my b.u.t.tonhole."

"Humour me, Mr Lunghi. My job here is very boring."

So a magnifying gla.s.s it was. With Rosetta's help he eventually found one in Marie's room part of a school kit that had never been used.

And, as things turned out, Dorothy Simbals' chest was entirely worthy of attention. She was not a young woman, but she was in very good shape. Shape ... Salvatore was pleased to meet her.

"Can I get you a coffee? Or something else?" he asked.

"A coffee, please," she said. "You'll get it cheaper from the machine over there." She pointed. "But better if you queue at the counter." The opposite direction.

"Nothing but the best for you."

"Is the right answer."

Salvatore brought back two lattes and a pain au chocolat. He suggested they split the pastry when he sat. "Don't want you to waste away."

"I think I'll start wearing my name tag on my shoulder."

He laughed and then offered to clink coffee cups with her. "Salute."

"Cheers."

They clinked and sipped.

Then she said, "Jack Appleby. Or Jonathan Aloysius Appleby, to be more exact."

"Lordy," Salvatore said.

"Not a name you see every day. What do you know about him?"

"I was told that he gravitated to nursing after graduating from uni."

"Got his degree from Cardiff thirteen years ago."

"Making him ...?"

"Thirty-six."

"What does one intend to use a degree in Spanish for?" Salvatore wondered aloud. "Teaching?"

"Jonathan Aloysius's CV says that he travelled for a year and then did volunteer work in a hospice."

"Where?"

"Weston." An area in the northeast of Bath. "His grandmother was there and instead of just visiting he decided to try to help out. He stayed ..." she consulted a thin file she'd brought with her "for about a year. His next stop was to train as a care a.s.sistant. You do that on-the-job and he trained in the oncology unit here. They rated him highly and he spent a year or so here. Then he moved to another hospice, and after that to a nursing home." She turned to a new page. "Another hospice, and then another."

"Is bouncing from one place to another like that the way it usually works for care a.s.sistants?"

"I'm not an expert but probably not. Yet it happens. If you get to care I mean personally for people in hospices you can be affected when they ... go."

Salvatore nodded. "And perhaps he has a special affinity with people in acute distress."

"All his references praise his work. Then a few years ago he did proper nurses' training. That was in Bristol, where he was again rated highly. Then he came back here. He's been at the RUH nearly two years and his performance evaluations have been outstanding. Care to guess what ward he works on here now?"

"Oncology?"

"He began there, but then six months ago he switched to maternity."

Salvatore laughed. "So, a new speciality."