Grave Island: a compelling mystery thriller Read online

  She shook her head. ‘I can manage, thanks. Call me as soon as you have some news.’ She held out her hand and I shook it before opening the saloon door for her and following her on deck. I looked on anxiously as she held onto the rope railing on her way down to the pontoon. I watched until she was safely ashore.

  Back in the saloon, a slight hint of her perfume remained which made itself felt even over the default smell of paint. Wondering what I was letting myself in for, I phoned my ex-wife. We were still on good terms, each of us recognising that our marriage was simply a mistake that we got out of as soon as we decently could. Since then, while I stayed on in the army, she’d managed to qualify as a doctor which meant that she was sometimes almost impossible to get hold of, so I left my usual message in her mailbox.

  I picked up the pad on which Greta had written down the names and contact details. Swearing yet again at the phone company who still hadn’t managed to install the Internet, I realised that after this I wasn’t going to get any more work done on the boat. I cleaned myself up and took my laptop for a walk down to the nearby café. I thought I could use their Wi-Fi to find out a bit more about the people I was now apparently investigating.

  Later that day, I brought a chair up on deck and sat with my notepad looking at the river which was busily minding its own business on its way to the sea. I found there was something calming in the way the water acted as a backdrop, changing with the tides and the weather – disinterested in any human dramas that might unfold around it.

  It turned out that Greta’s father, Greg, was quite well known as a developer of admittedly third-tier developments. He had an impressive track record, with several laudatory interviews in the trade press. His partners, on the other hand, appeared to have a much lower profile. Indeed, I had found out almost nothing about them beyond their swanky address in the middle of the hedge-fund district in London’s Mayfair. I didn’t find out much about Greta herself, although I did discover that she had quite a senior position in one of the big accountancy firms.

  The hospital, on the other hand, had pages devoted to it, or rather its parent company did – IHG was a huge multinational which appeared to have health interests around the globe. It seemed that there was a lot of money in illness and these were the institutional shamans of the twenty-first century.

  I’d put in a call to the hospital’s general manager and engaged in a game of telephone snooker as the calls went back and forth. Ever since some Australian journalists managed to get through to a ward by pretending they were royalty (and a pretty poor pretence it was) hospitals were wary about who phoned them. By using a thinly-veiled threat about the sudden and inexplicable death of Gregory Satchwell, I had finally managed to make an appointment for the following day with their general manager, David Evans. The doctor, on the other hand, hadn’t returned my calls.

  As if she knew I was thinking about her, at that moment my phone bleeped. I picked it up and checked the caller ID. ‘Sally,’ I said, without waiting to hear her talk. ‘How is the medical business? Are you winning?’

  ‘If you only knew,’ she replied testily. ‘Did Greta find you out on your raft?’

  ‘It’s not a raft.’ Considering the effort I had put in, I rather resented her levity. ‘It’s soon to be a luxury river cruiser.’

  ‘Yeah, James told me about it. He said you’d set up a standing order to the nearby rescue services, as a sort of payment in advance.’ Sally always had an amusing look on life. Amusing to her, that is.

  ‘You’ll have to come and see for yourself,’ I replied austerely.

  ‘Only if you have spare lifejackets.’ She laughed, not very nicely, I thought.

  The badinage had gone far enough. ‘Tell me about Greta,’ I asked. ‘Why did you think I could help? I don’t know anything about her father’s illness.’

  ‘I couldn’t think of anyone else,’ Sally said – not exactly flatteringly. ‘Anyway, it’ll do you good to get out into the real world for a change.’

  ‘Since when have I not been in the real world? Who do you think has been helping to keep you safe from terrorism? There hasn’t been a single terrorist attack while I’ve been on watch.’ (Although there had been several attempted ones that we’d prevented.)

  ‘Didn’t James Bond work for the other lot? I meant the real world that the rest of us live in.’ She stopped suddenly and her voice became serious. ‘Greta’s not a fool, you know. If she thinks something’s not right, then there’s probably something in it. Certainly something worth looking into and it’s not as if you’re overburdened with work.’

  I let that one pass. ‘Is there any reason to think she’s right in thinking that Greg Satchwell was murdered? Couldn’t it have been from natural causes?’

  ‘It could, but the operation was fairly routine. It was only laparoscopy – keyhole surgery, that is, so there wasn’t major trauma. On the other hand late fifties can sometimes be a dangerous age for a man.’

  ‘I’m seeing the hospital manager tomorrow. Is there anything specific I should ask?’

  ‘See if they’d done an electrocardiogram at any stage. That should have given them advance warning of any problems. And see if there was a blood test.’

  ‘So you don’t think this might be a wild goose chase?’

  ‘It might be, but as I say, I trust Greta. I’ve known her a long time.’

  ‘Yes, since school. She told me.’ Was there a note of bitterness in my voice?

  ‘Let me know what happens,’ Sally said, and then she was gone, even before I had time to arrange for her to come and see my new home.

  By this time, it was getting darker and I stayed a while as the lights along the river grew brighter. I felt a strange and rather exhilarating sense of freedom and wondered whether this was what Sally called the real world. I didn’t have layers of superior officers above me and I could choose what I wanted to do, not that my range of choices was exactly large, but still. How much of what people did came about as a result of accidents? Some event, tiny in itself, like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings, but enough to send a life off in a completely different direction?

  In Harley Street the next day, I could take my pick of hospitals – I couldn’t work out how they could fit so many of them into such a tight space. As for doctors, I was spoiled for choice – there were long rows of brass nameplates outside each of the Georgian town houses. Most of them specialised in diseases of the rich. Couriers on bicycles, going the wrong way up a one-way street, weaved in and out of the pedestrians, carrying urgent blood supplies and perhaps even spare body parts.

  When I eventually found the hospital, I wondered if it was the right place – it certainly didn’t feel anything like a hospital. The double doors were manned by someone who looked like a visiting admiral, complete with waistcoat and brass buttons – I wondered whether I had to tip him on my way in.

  The reception area looked like the lobby of the United Nations, with women dressed from head to toe in black, escorted by contrasting young men in casual jeans and Armani leather jackets.

  I was shown up to a characterless office – in an effort not to look like a hospital, these places seemed to specialise in bland interiors whose motif was clearly beige. The veneers were of an indeterminate light wood and even the floor-to-ceiling slatted blinds were beige – the blind leading the bland, I thought. Although I’d asked Greta to confirm her authority for him to speak to me, David Evans was as bland as the décor and very uncommunicative. He would only confirm the basic facts. ‘Mr Satchwell came in for a relatively routine operation which, as far as anyone could tell, had been successful and that it was only later, during the early morning, that he had deteriorated.’ Evans shook his head sadly. ‘These things happen and we’re truly sorry when they do, but it’s not our fault.’

  ‘I’m not saying it was, but there must be a reason for his relapse. So far, no one has given his daughter any explanation.’

  ‘You’ll have to speak to the doctors about that,’ Evans sa
id with practised evasion. ‘My job here is to make the hospital run smoothly. The patients are the responsibility of the medical staff.’

  ‘Surely their security is your responsibility?’

  ‘Security, yes, and you’ll find that we take it very seriously. All visitors have to sign in and we have CCTV cameras throughout the hospital which are monitored permanently by our security staff.’

  My pulse quickened at the mention of surveillance cameras. ‘Can I look at the recordings for that evening?’

  Evans was clearly about to say no, but stopped himself while he thought about it. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said finally. ‘If only because it will reassure you that nothing untoward happened here.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll take you to our security office and show you the cameras on the way.’

  I followed him out of his office and along the corridor where he pointed out the cameras at both ends, as well as two covering the nurses’ station. ‘As I said, all visitors have to sign in and we can also record them down in reception and then follow them around.’ He turned to a door near the end of the corridor and opened it, allowing me to go ahead of him.

  A man was sitting in front of a bank of TV monitors and, seeing the general manager, he stood up and looked at me expectantly. ‘Bob, this is Philip Hennessey,’ Evans said. ‘This is Bob Tyler, our acting head of security.’ I shook Tyler’s outstretched hand. ‘Mr Hennessey is helping Mr Satchwell’s daughter come to terms with her father’s death.’ I suppose that’s one way of putting it, I thought.

  Bob Tyler was in his mid to late fifties but was someone who clearly looked after himself.

  ‘I said we’d give him what help we could,’ continued Evans, ‘so that he can see that there was nothing… suspicious about it.’ He hesitated over the word “suspicious”, as though it had a nasty taste. ‘Perhaps you could show him the recordings from the cameras?’ It was clear he’d now finished with me – not that there was much else I could get out of him. Being allowed to look at the video recordings was more than I thought I’d get.

  Bob pointed to one of the screens. ‘That’s the corridor outside what was Mr Satchwell’s room, number 315.’ So Bob had already looked into it and knew the room number. As though reading my mind, he added, ‘Whenever there are sudden deaths we have to produce a report about the general circumstances. We don’t comment on the medical aspect, but we like people to know that we are aware of the circumstances.’

  So they can hush it up, I thought uncharitably.

  Bob pulled out a disc for the previous week’s recordings and showed me how to cue it to the time that Greg Satchwell returned from his few hours in intensive care. After that I pushed it to fast forward and made a note of how many people came into his room. By the time I got to midnight I had a total of eight visits, but of those the night nurse had entered five times, Greta once, followed shortly afterwards by a doctor who was obviously bringing Greta up to date.

  After she’d left, there was quite a long gap before the doctor returned. I noted the times and went back and played each visit more slowly. On the face of it, it was a perfectly normal evening in a private hospital, quiet and calm. But why would a doctor make a second call so late at night? What could he find out that he didn’t already know?

  On a hunch, I asked for the disc for the reception area and Bob cued it to ten minutes before the doctor was seen for the second time on the corridor above. Sure enough, it showed someone entering and signing in. He was wearing street clothes – what looked like a sports jacket, rather than the white coat he was wearing when he appeared later up on the third floor. I looked more closely at the screen and realised that this wasn’t the doctor coming back but someone entirely different. Bob, who’d been watching the videos over my shoulder, was starting to look concerned by what I was finding. He suggested we look at the third-floor reception area and after a few minutes the stranger could be seen coming out from the lift and approaching the nurses’ station.

  This time he’d acquired the white coat, although I couldn’t tell where he’d picked it up from or where he had found the stethoscope he had around his neck. He started talking to the nurses who handed him some records which he examined before handing them back and heading for Greg Satchwell’s room. I wondered why the nurses hadn’t questioned him but realised that the stethoscope was his badge of authority.

  I turned to Bob. ‘Can you print out a face shot from this, and also from the recording when he originally signed in?’ Bob re-cued the video and zoomed into the face and pressed the “print screen” button. ‘And the recordings?’ I asked. ‘Can I get a copy?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he said without hesitation. ‘I’ve gone too far with this already.’ He handed me the printouts. ‘You can’t tell anyone where you got these from, or my job’s on the line. I’m letting you have them on condition you tell me if you find out anything, I might need some support.’

  ‘Thanks for your help.’ I folded the printouts into my pocket. As an afterthought, I asked him if he’d been working at the hospital long.

  ‘Only a few months,’ he replied. ‘When the previous security manager left they transferred me temporarily from one of their other, smaller, hospitals.’

  ‘How many do they have?’

  ‘In London? Six here but dozens more around the country.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll offer you the job permanently?’ I asked.

  ‘Huh? No, not at my age. They’ll probably bring in some kid and put him over my head. Roll on retirement,’ he added.

  I wondered what it must be like only to have retirement to look forward to – all those empty days. I thanked Bob for his help and assured him that I’d keep in touch, even though I had no intention of doing so. He’d certainly been more helpful than I had expected – perhaps that’s why he was only acting head of security. I thought about it on my way back to Wapping, unsure of what to do next. Certainly it was odd that a different doctor should make a call so late at night, but wasn’t it a jump too far to go from that to murder?

  But at least I had something concrete to investigate, and on my way back I ducked into an Internet café and scanned the photo into my phone. I emailed it to Greta and asked her to phone me as soon as she got it. I thought it was now time to follow it up from the other end and find out more about Tribune Investments, but that wasn’t going to be easy.

  I hadn’t been back long before Greta phoned. She sounded excited and slightly breathless. ‘That man, who is he? I’ve seen him before. He works at Tribune Investments.’

  4

  It appeared that Greta might have been right about her father’s death after all, but recognising the man in the printout wasn’t going to get us very far. Without independent corroboration of the link with Tribune Investments they could simply deny it and there wouldn’t be anything we could do. I scrolled through my contact list – over the years I’d used an odd-job man to help with my various removals and do-it-yourself fit-outs – Paul was a man with a van, but I thought he might be able to help. It rang for a long time but didn’t go to voicemail, so I assumed he would answer in due course. When he finally did, it was clear that I’d woken him.

  Paul was not an early riser, nor did he snap into immediate consciousness when he finally did rise – although I use the word “rise” loosely, since from what I knew of him he was generally horizontal for a considerable time after waking.

  When I was finally confident that he was vaguely compos mentis, I explained that I wanted him to wait outside the Tribune offices and photograph whoever went in or out. I emailed the scanned picture from the hospital saying that he should phone me immediately if he saw the man anywhere.

  ‘A stakeout,’ he said. ‘How exciting!’ At least that seemed to wake him.

  Of course, he was quite wrong. A stakeout is almost terminally boring which was why I wasn’t going to do it myself, and anyway, Greta was paying for it. If the suspect really did work at Tribune then I might not have long to wait and if Paul got a photo of
him entering or leaving Tribune’s premises, it would be pretty damning evidence.

  Next, I looked up the number of Greg Satchwell’s doctor that Greta had left on the pad. This time the phone was answered by a secretary. I explained who I was and she replied that Professor West had been told by Greta Satchwell to expect my call. Professor? Greta hadn’t told me that bit – he must have been from a teaching hospital. The secretary confirmed this when she made an appointment for me the following morning at an NHS hospital in London’s West End.

  I noted down directions and wondered about the life of consultants who bridged the gap between public and private medicine, keeping a foot in both camps. Perhaps in their view the one was subsidising the other. There wasn’t much more I could do now, so I climbed into my overalls and got back to work on the boat.

  Arriving at the hospital the next day, I felt a bit like Theseus in the labyrinth, and wished I had an Ariadne to leave a thread for me to follow. The place was a contortion of corridors, cul-de-sacs, and no-entry zones – it certainly couldn’t be mistaken for the private clinics around Harley Street and this one even smelled like a hospital. Finally, I managed to find the professor’s office, but it had taken so long that I was running late when I arrived. The secretary looked pointedly at the wall clock.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I apologised. That’s why hospital appointments always tell you to come fifteen minutes early, to give you time to get lost.

  The professor was quite a short man, with a little goatee beard. To be honest, I wasn’t that keen on short men with goatee beards, but I tried not to hold that against him.

  ‘Greta has told me about her concerns,’ he said. He had a clipped, rather self-conscious way of talking, a bit schoolmasterly, but then he was a professor. ‘I have to say that I share some of these concerns and I’m glad that someone is looking into it for her.’