Fruiting Bodies Read online

  ‘It’s a pretty good haul that Evelyn’s provided,’ he said, looking up from the big green-and-white picnic box. His face was flushed but that could have been because he had been hanging down head first into its coldness.

  ‘What would you like, Willow? There’s smoked salmon and something that looks like salmon pâté, or perhaps it’s crab.’ He sniffed it. ‘Crab. Sandwiches filled with all the usual amazing things, some pies that look savoury and a lot of cakes, puddings.’

  ‘I can’t imagine she didn’t put in anything a bit healthier. Isn’t there any fruit?’ said Willow amused all over again by the bond Rob had struck up with her housekeeper. She had never been able to bring herself to address Mrs Rusham as Evelyn without an invitation and had not received one.

  ‘Yeah, but you don’t want any of that now, do you? What about a florentine?’

  ‘Good idea!’ said Willow laughing at his determination to fatten her up. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Sandwiches first and then one of these strawberry thingies, if that’s okay?’ he said, looking sheepishly at her. ‘Though I shouldn’t really because Evelyn must have made them for you. Oh, how’s your baby? Sorry, I should have asked before.’

  ‘She’s fine.’ Willow looked down at Lucinda. ‘About to go to sleep again. Let’s have tea and then you can make her acquaintance later. Now, how’s school?’

  ‘Not so bad,’ he said.

  Willow pressed him and listened to a highly coloured account of his last week’s work, sport, trouble with the masters, and interest in one of the brighter girls in the year below his. Never having had siblings of her own or known any boys of Rob’s age, Willow had taken some time to learn how he thought and could be approached, but, by watching him and Tom talk, she had gradually done it.

  As he talked, Willow commented, asked what she hoped were all the right questions and watched him eat Mrs Rusham’s delicacies as though he had not seen any other food for forty-eight hours. Eventually he stopped, grinned at her from under his lanky fringe and added: ‘They all say I talk too much. Sorry.’

  ‘I like it, Rob,’ said Willow truthfully. It was all too easy to remember the sullen, closed-in appearance he had presented after his mother’s death. ‘And there’s generosity in letting me know such a lot about yourself and your life. Don’t worry.’

  ‘How is the baby?’ he asked with an air of conscientious politeness.

  Willow pulled the shawl down a little so that Rob could see Lucinda’s face.

  ‘She’s fine, doing well, feeding properly – though perhaps not well enough to rival you yet.’

  He smirked but then his face changed as he added: ‘And what about you? Tom said everything had gone well when he rang me this morning, but it must have been awful with your doctor dying like that.’

  ‘That was awful,’ agreed Willow, but she was surprised. ‘Did Tom tell you about him?’

  ‘No, he didn’t say a word. But I heard some nurses talking about it while I was trying to find out where you were. He was your doctor, wasn’t he? This Ringstead bloke?’ Rob frowned.

  ‘Not exactly mine. He was the consultant who was technically in charge of me, but I hardly ever saw him for more than a minute or two. One doesn’t, you see, unless there’s a particular problem that the midwives and junior doctors can’t cope with.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Willow. ‘No one seems to know for sure yet and I still can’t quite believe it’s happened at all.’

  Remembering her vision of Ringstead walking along the passage only a little while earlier, she shivered and held Lucinda more tightly.

  ‘I know that he’s dead, but it doesn’t always seem quite real. A minute ago I even thought I saw him. I feel as though part of my brains have gone AWOL, although they must be as firmly fixed in my skull as usual.’

  ‘Actually they’re not all that firmly fixed,’ said Rob with a faint smile. ‘They sort of float, bathed in liquid. All brains do. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I did. But I’m surprised you do.’

  ‘Well, I’m thinking of going in for them. I thought you knew that I’m aiming at medical school if my A-level grades are good enough next year.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Willow, ‘but I hadn’t realised before that it was brains that interested you.’

  Rob flushed again and looked much more like the difficult unhappy boy of two years earlier.

  ‘I’d like to understand about them,’ he said gruffly. ‘Really understand, you know. About how personality works and free will and all that. I don’t mean genetically, but in terms of the chemicals and neurons and things. I want to know what effect changes in the neurotransmitters have and just exactly what the hypothalamus does. That sort of stuff.’

  All the mischief had gone from his eyes as he stared down at his scruffy trainers. He picked at one of the spots that disfigured his strong chin.

  ‘I can’t think of anything more absorbing,’ Willow said quietly, remembering the years of psychiatric illness that had preceded his mother’s death. ‘Or more useful. Look, could you bear to have a go at holding Lucinda for me? My pillows are digging into my back. I need to sort them out.’

  ‘Won’t I break her?’

  ‘No, of course you won’t. And if you’re going to be a doctor, you’ll have to get used to holding babies, even if you’re going in for brains in the end.’

  She watched while Rob sat stiffly with the baby in his arms. When Lucinda waved one of her arms out of the shawl, he stroked it warily and then felt her grasp his finger and drag it towards her mouth. He pulled away, but then touched her cheek.

  ‘Have you really no idea what happened to your obstetrician?’ he asked, not looking at Willow. ‘That’s unlike you.’

  ‘I haven’t been able to find out anything yet,’ she said. ‘Nobody seems to know. Or at least if they do know they haven’t passed it on to any of us.’

  ‘One of the nurses I overheard was saying that he must have been murdered but one of the others thought he might have done it himself.’ Rob frowned. ‘I sort of hoped you might know.’

  Wishing that the nurses could have kept their thoughts to themselves, Willow repeated most of what her neighbour had pointed out that morning.

  ‘I don’t think that a doctor with access to every possible drug would ever have thought of killing himself like that,’ she said, watching Rob relax. ‘You really needn’t worry about suicide. He could have had a heart attack or a fit of some kind and fallen into the pool unconscious. Or he could have been knocked down and held under the water. But I can’t think of any other possible explanation.’

  ‘Have you got any idea who could have done it – if it was murder, I mean?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Willow. Then she smiled. ‘And I can hardly go round the hospital asking questions in this state.’

  ‘I could do it for you,’ said Rob, sounding as though he were serious.

  ‘No, you couldn’t. You’ve got far too much to do. Your A-level work is very important. You can’t possibly take time off to fossick about in a mystery that’s none of our business and probably isn’t even a mystery any longer. The police may well have solved it already.’

  ‘Oh yes I can,’ he said, ignoring her last comment. ‘The exams aren’t for more than a year. Look, as a future medical student, I can ask all sorts of questions around the hospital that you couldn’t possibly ask, even if you hadn’t just had a baby. There was an open day here a couple of weeks ago for people who are thinking of applying here. I didn’t go because I don’t particularly want to come here, but it means that I can wander about and talk to people. If anyone challenges me I’ll just say I missed the open day and am trying to catch up so that I can decide whether to apply here or not. If they’re suspicious, they can check with school and find out I’m telling the truth. How’s that?’ He smiled, inviting approval.

  ‘Not bad,’ she said, giving him as much as she could. ‘But I honestly don’t think
you should bunk off school even if you have got a year to go before A-levels. They’re far too important. The whole of the rest of your life depends on how well you do.’

  ‘I’ve got lots of time. And you want to know what really happened to him as well, don’t you?’

  ‘Very much,’ she said truthfully, ‘but, Rob, you must be careful. Talk to Tom and ask him anything you want, but don’t talk to anybody else. Anything they told you might not be accurate, and wrong information is worse than none at all. Much more worrying.’

  Rob looked mutinous. Willow thought that any more good advice would only increase his stubbornness and so she simply suggested that he should return Lucinda to her cot and have something else to eat from Mrs Rusham’s box. He wolfed down four more sandwiches.

  Tom shouldered his way through the curtains just as Rob was shaking the crumbs from the last sandwich off his loose black trousers. Tom, who was carrying a big bunch of roses, laid a carelessly affectionate hand on the boy’s shoulder before coming to kiss Willow.

  ‘Good to see you, Rob,’ he said when he had straightened up. ‘I’m glad you’ve made Lucinda’s acquaintance.’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ said Rob, looking wistful. ‘I do think you’re both lucky.’

  Willow glanced at Tom, hoping that he would understand what she wanted to ask. After a moment he pushed his lips forward in a familiar expression that meant he was taking some proposition seriously, and nodded. Willow smiled brilliantly and turned to ask Rob if he would like to be one of Lucinda’s godfathers.

  He blinked, smiled, tried to speak and failed. Having shaken his head, and looked down at her face as though for inspiration, he eventually managed to make his voice work.

  ‘I should be honoured,’ he said with a formality the others had never heard from him. Then he added in a much more characteristic rush: ‘And I’d like it, too. I really would. It’d be great.’

  ‘Good,’ said Willow. ‘Then you’ll be officially part of the family as well, which will be very nice indeed.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ He scrambled to his feet, and clumsily offered his hand to Tom, who shook it in a comfortingly manly fashion. ‘I’d better go though now, and let you have a bit of peace, hadn’t I?’

  ‘No need,’ Tom was saying, but Rob swung the big bag of prep up from the floor, waved at them all and was gone.

  ‘He’s such a good boy,’ said Willow, watching the curtains fluttering in his wake.

  ‘I know. That was a nice gesture of yours, Will.’

  Chapter Four

  Day Three – Afternoon

  Rob was back just as Willow was waking from her post-lunch sleep the following day. He was carrying a mobile he had made to hang over Lucinda’s cot. It was a simple contraption of plastic-coated wire, fishing line, card, and foil of various colours, but it had a carefree kind of glamour that made Willow smile. Rob held it up just above the cot and Willow watched the coloured shapes fluttering in the warm air currents. A movement from Lucinda suggested that she had noticed them too.

  ‘It’s brilliant,’ Willow said, genuinely impressed. ‘How did you know what to make?’

  ‘The art master’s just had his second baby and knows what they like when they’re hardly seeing anything yet. I nipped back to school last night and caught him just as he was leaving. He gave me a lot of help. I finished it before early school this morning. I’d have been here sooner, but I had classes this morning that I couldn’t cut.’

  He laid the mobile carefully on Willow’s small bedside locker, but it slithered off on to the floor. He picked it up, straightened its strings anxiously and then, after a moment, hung it over the knob of the cupboard.

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t cut any lessons,’ said Willow, frowning. ‘Your …’

  ‘A-levels are far too important,’ he said mockingly, wagging his head from side to side and putting on an idiotic smile. He looked much more cheerful than he had the previous day.

  ‘Okay, okay. I know,’ said Willow, smiling at him. ‘It’s none of my business and I’m not your Aunt Agatha or even one of your teachers.’

  ‘Too right. But look, Willow, I’ve started talking to people and I think you’re right. This Ringstead bloke can’t possibly have killed himself.’

  Willow looked carefully at Rob, but the only emotion she could see in his dark eyes was satisfaction. That seemed worth encouraging.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, apart from what you said about him having access to drugs, drowning himself in something as shallow as that pool would be far too difficult, too painful, and too likely to be interrupted. It’s not like filling your pockets with stones and jumping into a deep lake.’

  ‘No. I can see that.’

  ‘And in any case, he’d suddenly got very happy recently, which doesn’t sound as though he could have wanted to bump himself off.’

  ‘How do you know that? I haven’t heard anything like it at all.’

  ‘I’ve been listening to hospital gossip,’ said Rob looking even more pleased with himself. ‘And everyone says that although he’d been in a pretty bad mood, snappy and irritable, he’d got much happier and been singing in the corridors recently and making jokes instead of tearing strips off people.’

  ‘And does hospital gossip suggest any reason for the change?’ asked Willow with a slight smile.

  Rob’s eyes glinted. ‘Yeah. He’d lost weight and been wearing new cufflinks – great heavy gold ones – and much jazzier ties than usual. They think he’d got a new girlfriend, much richer than the old one, who was a nurse here.’

  ‘Aha!’

  ‘Yeah. So you see why it’s unlikely he wanted to do away with himself.’ Rob lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Although it sounds as though there are quite a lot of other people who won’t be too unhappy now he is dead.’

  ‘Like who?’ asked Willow, wincing internally at her lapse from good grammar. She spoke in her usual voice, knowing from long experience that a whispered conversation arouses infinitely more interest in potential eavesdroppers than one conducted at a normal pitch.

  ‘Well, for a start, there’s his registrar – a man called Kimmeridge.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ Willow might have taken exception to Doctor Kimmeridge’s brusqueness, but she could not believe that he would have drowned his boss. ‘Who on earth suggested him?’

  ‘A couple of nurses I had lunch with.’

  For a moment Willow was too surprised to speak. Looking thoroughly pleased with the effect he had created, Rob dragged forward a chair and sat down very close to the side of her bed.

  ‘I went to the staff canteen here,’ he said casually, as though it had been the most ordinary thing for a schoolboy to do, ‘and got a tray and just sat down next to them. Nobody seemed surprised or bothered. They were talking about Ringstead when I sat down and I just let them get on with it. Apparently Kimmeridge thought Ringstead was blocking his chances of promotion with bad references and things. Kimmeridge is quite experienced enough to be a consultant and he’s said to be very good at his job, but he’s never even got on to the shortlist anywhere he applied. He’s stuck as a registrar and jolly angry about it.’

  ‘Did the nurses think it was Ringstead’s fault that Kimmeridge is stuck?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Rob. ‘The general view seemed to be that the people who appoint consultants here and in the other big hospitals he’d applied to are all snobs and he isn’t public school enough for them. They don’t like his Leicestershire accent and he doesn’t suck up to them and hasn’t enough important friends, unlike your man who seems to have cultivated them. But Kimmeridge blamed him and that must be what counts.’

  ‘I’m amazed,’ said Willow. ‘And frightfully impressed with you, Rob. You’ve been absolutely brilliant.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, glowing with pleasure. ‘And there’s plenty more.’

  Willow laughed. ‘I’m not sure I’m capable of absorbing much more.’

  ‘No, no, you must listen to this
.’

  ‘Of course I will. I was only joking.’

  ‘Good. Your man thought some of the ambulance crews had a scam going and he’d been trying to get three of them suspended just before he died. They must have wanted him stopped.’

  ‘What sort of scam?’ Willow’s mind went from stolen petrol to fiddled expenses and false overtime claims.

  ‘According to the nurses, he’d decided that whenever they picked up someone from a house that was obviously empty and had expensive things in it, they’d tip off some mates of theirs to go round and burgle it,’ said Rob joyously.

  Willow realised that the whole business was turning into a game for him and she was prepared to encourage that, even though the reality of what had happened to Ringstead made it impossible for her to find any entertainment in the circumstances surrounding his death.

  ‘Apparently there’d been a spate of break-ins round here,’ Rob said, quite unaware of what she was thinking, ‘and your bloke thought it too much of a coincidence that so many patients brought here by ambulance found they’d been robbed when they got home. He’d started to ask around and check with people who’d been discharged to find out whether their houses had been burgled and if so which crew had brought them in. He hadn’t bothered to do any of it discreetly, and he’d caused a lot of bad feeling.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’ Willow thought for a while. ‘Hmm. You’ve done awfully well, Rob.’

  He sat up very straight. His thin chest seemed to have filled out too, and all his joints had become much less floppy than usual.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘It would have been really easy for an ambulance-driver to dress up as a porter and push a trolley along the corridors until they found your man. Then all they’d have had to do was say that there was an emergency in the birthing pool and run on ahead so that they were there ready to tip him in and hold his head under.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Willow, blinking at the evidence of Rob’s unexpectedly vivid imagination. ‘The police must know all this already if the nurses are gossiping about it in the canteen. I wonder …’