Till We Meet Again

Till We Meet Again

LESLEY PEARSE

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Michael Joseph 2002
Published in Penguin Books 2002
21

Copyright © Lesley Pearse, 2002
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN-13: 978-0-141-92499-1

For all parents who have lost a child to meningitis.
My heart goes out to you all.

Acknowledgements

To two wonderful men, without whose help and support I could never have written this book: Inspector Jonathan Moore for his input on police investigative procedures, and John Roberts, Criminal lawyer in Bristol, for insight into the world of law. You both gave your help so unstintingly and offered me encouragement and support when I needed it. I loved your humour, your lack of pomposity and patience. Bless you both. Any mistakes or blunders are mine, not yours, and my excuse is that I couldn’t hope to gather up all your tremendous experience and knowledge without spending at least a month or two in your shoes. Should any of my readers fall in love with Detective Inspector Roy Longhurst in my book, then it is because I was inspired by the characters of these two sweethearts.

To Harriet Evans, my editor at Penguin Books. How anyone so young can have so much wisdom and diplomacy beats me. I’ll have you know I didn’t once throw your notes across the room in disgust, or say ‘What does she know!’ You do know. You are clever, intuitive, sweet-natured and a joy to work with. Thank you, Harrie, and not just for your expertise in editing, but for the comfort when I was unsure of myself, and for the many laughs along the way.

Finally, a very special thank you to the Spencer Dayman Meningitis Laboratories in Bristol for giving me so much invaluable information about meningitis. While meningococcal B remains a serious threat to society countrywide, this charity’s sterling work in providing funds for the research and development of vaccines against meningitis and associated diseases is of vital importance. If you would like to help in fundraising or to make a donation to the charity, please contact The Spencer Dayman Meningitis Laboratories, 25 Cleevewood Road, Downend, Bristol
BS16 2SF
.

Chapter one

October 1995

Pamela Parks glanced up from the appointment book at the sound of the street door opening. It was quarter to ten on Thursday morning, and the waiting room was full of patients. To her shock, the person coming in was the unkempt woman who spent most days sitting on a bench in the square outside the medical centre.

Pamela was not a tolerant person. At forty-five, with two grown-up children, she prided herself on her trim figure, her elegance and her efficiency. She had no time for anyone who didn’t share her own exacting standards. She certainly didn’t have any time for this woman, whom one of the nurses had nicknamed ‘Vinnie’. The nickname had been given because Vinnie was often seen swigging from a bottle of cheap wine, and the general view was that she was an ex-mental patient who had been released out into the community without proper supervision.

It was raining hard outside and Vinnie paused on the mat by the door, pushing her stringy wet hair away from her plump, red-tinged face. She wore a torn see-through plastic mackintosh over a short coat, and old plimsolls on her feet.

Bristling with indignation, Pamela slid back the window beside the reception desk. ‘You can’t come in here,’ she called out. ‘Not to get out of the rain, or to use our toilet. Clear off now or I’ll call the police.’

Vinnie took no notice, instead she took off her plastic mac and hung it up on a peg by the door. Incensed that the woman was ignoring her, Pamela leaned across the reception desk to get a better look at what she was doing. She appeared to be getting something out of her coat pocket.

‘I said, you can’t come in here,’ Pamela repeated. She felt slightly panicky – there were at least ten people waiting for appointments, two doctors had been delayed on emergency calls, and Muriel, the senior receptionist, was in the adjoining room getting patients’ notes from the files.

‘I came to see you,’ Vinnie said, walking deliberately towards her.

Pamela stepped back from the reception desk, suddenly frightened by the woman’s eyes. They were a pale greenish-blue colour, very cold and hard. Close up, she didn’t look as old as Pamela had assumed, in fact she was probably around the same age as Pamela herself.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ the woman went on to say, a faint smirk twisting up one side of her mouth. ‘Of course I’ve changed, I suppose. You haven’t, you’re just as rude and callous as you were then.’

Suddenly Pamela’s memory was triggered by the voice. But before she could say anything, the woman’s arm came up above the level of the reception desk. She was holding a gun in her hand and pointing it right at Pamela.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Pamela said instinctively, backing away in fright. But it was too late for flight, a shot rang out, and simultaneously she felt a searing pain in her chest.

In the adjoining office, Muriel Olding had heard Pamela ordering someone out, but she couldn’t see who it was for the room had no windows on to the hall. Although shocked by Pamela’s brusqueness, and curious to know who it was directed at, at that precise moment Muriel was supporting a precarious pile of files on the open drawer of a cabinet.

But on hearing a woman’s voice say quite calmly, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ rather than hurling abuse at Pamela, Muriel pushed the files more securely on to the cabinet and went over to the door which led into the hall to see who it was. She had just opened the door when there was a deafening bang.

Muriel didn’t even think of it being a gun shot. She thought it was a firework, for it was nearly the end of October and young louts had been letting them off for days all around the centre. As she opened the door and saw Vinnie standing there, a gun in her hand, the smell of cordite thick and pungent in the hall, she was rooted to the spot in disbelief.

For just a second the woman’s eyes locked into hers, but as Dr Wetherall flung his surgery door open, Vinnie spun round towards him as smoothly as if she were on a turntable.

‘What on earth!’ the doctor roared, but the woman halted him by firing again, hitting him in the chest.

Muriel couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Blood instantly spurted from Dr Wetherall’s chest, he made a sort of agonized moan, his hands coming up towards the wound and his eyes wide with shock, and he took a few staggering steps backwards into his consulting room.

It was pure instinct that made Muriel leap back into the office, slam the door and lock it behind her. Only when she realized that the screaming she could hear wasn’t just from herself, but from the patients in the waiting room as well, did she become fully aware that this was real, not some kind of nightmarish illusion.

Then she saw Pamela. She was spread-eagled on the floor of the adjoining room, blood pumping out of a hole in her chest.

With one leap Muriel managed to grab the phone, and taking cover beneath the desk, feverishly dialled 999.

Some four hours later Detective Inspector Roy Longhurst was sitting beside Muriel as she lay wrapped in a blanket on the couch in one of the upstairs consulting rooms. Downstairs the forensic team and police photographers were doing their work. All the other staff and patients who had been in the building at the time of the shooting had been in shock when Longhurst arrived, and a few were hysterical, but as none of them had actually witnessed what happened, almost all of them had been taken home now. Muriel had witnessed everything, however, and he was deeply concerned for her. She was close to sixty, and her grey hair and lined face reminded him of his own mother.

Taking one of her hands in his two large ones, he chafed it gently between them. ‘Now, Mrs Olding,’ he said. ‘Take your time and try to tell me exactly what you saw and heard this morning.’

Longhurst was forty-five, six feet two, and sixteen stone of sheer muscle. Even in civilian clothes, or on the rugby field, he still managed to look like a policeman, something that amused his mother who had always said he was born to be one.

Whilst not handsome, Longhurst was an attractive man with thick dark wavy hair, olive skin and soulful dark eyes. He belonged to the old school of policemen, scrupulously honest, but with fixed opinions. He had no patience with thugs who pleaded a troubled childhood. He’d had one himself and survived without resorting to villainy. He would bring back hanging and the birch if he could and he thought prisons should be much harder than they were. Yet for all this he was a compassionate man by nature, saving his sympathy for those who deserved it, like victims of crime. Mrs Olding, even though she wasn’t physically hurt, was a victim to him, for she was clearly devastated by what she’d seen that morning.

Dowry Square in the Hotwells area of Bristol had been built in the 1800s for wealthy merchants wishing to live away from the stink of the city’s docks. But unlike neighbouring Clifton, which had mostly managed to maintain its select image for two centuries, Hotwells had floundered. A huge network of busy roads, including a massive flyover, had turned it into an undesirable area several decades ago. But since the mid-1980s, when smart new complexes of flats and townhouses had been built along the river, it had been on the up-and-up.

The property which now housed the medical centre reflected all these changes. First an elegant family house then a disreputable boarding house and finally a surgery, it had seen a vast variety of owners and tenants. The patients of the practice ranged from down-and-outs in bed-and-breakfast accommodation to the owners of houses valued in excess of half a million, with students, council tenants, old hippies and young yuppies in between.

The centre still maintained its private-house image, however, with the consulting, waiting and treatment rooms all leading off a long central hallway. There were further consulting rooms upstairs too. From the reception desk with its sliding-glass windows to the front door was a distance of some fifteen feet.

When the firearms squad had arrived that morning, they knew that two people were already dead and there were some ten people in the waiting room, plus doctors and nurses. They had anticipated a hostage situation and were keyed up for it. They assumed, because they hadn’t been told otherwise, that the person who had carried out the shooting was male, and they expected it to be drug-related.

Yet when Longhurst had arrived a little later, he was told by the firearms squad that they had found the front door wide open, and a woman sitting on the hall floor. Their first thought was that the gunman had already fled, and this woman was too deeply shocked to move or speak. But after staring silently for a moment or two at the armed police officer in the doorway, she finally spoke. ‘It was me who shot them,’ she said, and indicated the gun on the floor beside her, partially concealed by her coat.

The officer ordered her to move away from the gun, which she did by shuffling sideways. After the gun was retrieved, she stood up of her own volition, pointing out where her two victims lay. When asked why she’d shot them, her cryptic reply was, ‘They know why.’

Longhurst had been responsible for arresting and cautioning the woman before she was taken to Bridewell. Although he was only with her for some ten minutes or so, he found her puzzling. She didn’t react at all to the hubbub just the other side of the door of the room she was being held in. Whilst she again admitted it was she who had shot the two people, she refused to give her name and address, and her down-and-out appearance was curiously at odds with her soft voice and dignified bearing. The gun, according to one of the armed squad, was a service revolver, almost certainly a relic from the Second World War.

‘I didn’t see her come in,’ Muriel said, her voice quavery with shock. ‘I was in the room beside the reception desk, well, it’s not so much a room, more a cubby-hole. The door through to the hall is in there, but there’s no window. All I heard was Pam raising her voice to whoever it was. She said, “You can’t come in here out of the rain, or to use the toilet, so clear off or I’ll call the police.” ’

‘Who did you think she was talking to?’ Longhurst asked.

Muriel shrugged. ‘I didn’t really think about it, though I suppose I imagined it was some kids or something. I did think that it was no way to speak to anyone, though, whoever it was.

‘Then I heard a woman’s voice. She said something like, “You don’t recognize me, do you?” She didn’t sound rough or anything. I was curious, and that’s why I opened the door to the hall. Just as I did, I heard the bang. I thought someone had let off a firework.’

‘What did you see in the hall?’

‘Vinnie, that’s what we called her.’

‘You knew her then?’

‘Yes, she sits outside in the square almost every morning, she has for at least eighteen months. But she’s never come into the centre before, at least not as far as I know.’

She finished telling Longhurst what she saw, and how she ran back into the office and called the police. ‘I was so scared,’ she said, beginning to cry again. ‘I’ve worked here for fifteen years, and nothing like this has ever happened before.’

Longhurst had been told that when the armed squad came into the centre, Muriel was still cowering under the reception desk, just feet away from the other woman’s body. She was rigid with terror, and deeply ashamed of herself for not thinking of the patients in the waiting room while she’d been taking cover.

It took some little while for the policeman who found her to convince her that immediately ringing the police and staying put had been the right and sensible thing to do. He had reassured her that none of the patients were hurt, as a nurse in the treatment room on the other side of the waiting room had ushered them all in there to safety. But Muriel still seemed to think she should have done more.

‘How long had Pamela Parks been working here?’ Longhurst asked.

‘About eight years, I think,’ Muriel said, and fresh tears sprang into her eyes. ‘Her poor husband and children! What are they going to do?’

Longhurst patted her hand again and waited for the tears to subside. ‘Were you and Pamela friends?’ he asked. ‘I mean, aside from working together.’

‘Not really,’ Muriel said, looking up at him with brimming eyes. ‘We didn’t have much in common. She was very smart, not a bit like me.’

Longhurst had already been told by one of the nurses that there was some friction between Muriel and Pamela. According to her, the older woman had been pushed on to the sidelines by Pamela because of her superior knowledge of computers. The nurse had said that Pamela was a little too officious, she wanted to streamline the whole running of the practice.

He had seen the dead woman before her body was taken away. She was very attractive, in her early forties, with blonde highlights in her hair and carefully manicured nails. He had already discovered that she lived in an expensive townhouse in Clifton, drove a BMW, and that her husband Roland Parks was a successful businessman. Very different to dumpy, middle-aged Muriel.

‘Was this woman you all called Vinnie a patient?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ Muriel replied. ‘She might be actually registered with us of course. Lots of people are that we never see as patients. We only get to know the regulars. But she’s never come in here before as far as I know.’

‘Tell me, then, when you used to see her sitting out in the square, what did you think of her?’ he asked.

Muriel shrugged. ‘Nothing much, only to wonder why the poor soul sat there every day. She did sometimes have a bottle of wine with her, so I suppose she was a drunk, but she wasn’t ever weaving around or shouting or anything.’

‘Did Pamela ever pass any comment on her?’

‘Yes, she was a bit hard on her.’ Muriel sighed. ‘She would say the woman ought to be put away somewhere. I suppose she was right after all.’

‘Might Pamela have had a run-in with her before this then?’ Longhurst asked.

Muriel frowned as if trying to remember. ‘I don’t think so, well, she never said that she had. Anyway, if it was that, why did the woman go and shoot Dr Wetherall too?’

‘Perhaps that was just because he came out of his room,’ Longhurst said.