Doctor Who_ The Sleep of Reason - Martin Day [48]
the whole story: creeping around, hoping not to be discovered, came naturally to her.
She was just about to step out into the open – after all, she had nothing to hide, she was simply enjoying a walk in the grounds – when she heard hushed voices from the other side of the hedge. Something about the tone of those voices – that heady mixture of the secretive and the couldn’t-care-less – that Laska recognised only too well. She found herself leaning towards the voices, the hairs on the back of her neck rising, feeling excitement and guilt in equal measure.
It was clear that Laska and James were not the only people to use the gardens for a secretive rendezvous.
‘You should have gone straight to see your darling wife,’ said the woman.
There was both serious concern and playful defiance in her voice.
At first Laska did not recognise the woman. It was, she supposed, one of the female nurses who, in Laska’s mind, became a single patronising, peroxided gestalt entity.
‘You worry too much,’ said the man.
Laska had to think long and hard before she could put a face to the male voice, and then at last it came. She’d only met him once, when she’d been reading in the south-facing lounge and he’d been waiting for Dr Bartholomew to finish some interminable meeting with the local council.
It was Joe Bartholomew, Liz’s husband.
She remembered him as being square-jawed and darkly handsome, the sort of good-looking man only just the right side of obvious arrogance. He was some years younger than Liz and had almost seemed to play up to this, larking about with the nurses and reading out their horoscopes in a mock falsetto.
‘It’s all right for you,’ the woman was saying. ‘You don’t have to work with her every day.’
Unbidden, a name came to Laska’s mind: Susannah. Susannah something.
Friendly enough and young enough to be attractive, Laska supposed, but not a patch on the dignified and elegant Elizabeth Bartholomew. But then, maybe that was what Joe was searching for – something different, and if she comes with her own uniform and a good pair of knockers, so much the better.
Joe whispered something to the woman – Laska could just make out Susannah giggling – and then their voices began to recede away and back towards the Retreat.
Laska pressed herself into the rough sanctuary of the hedge, waiting for them to disappear completely from sight – she could just see their backs as they made their way along a path of smooth cobbles – before she resumed her walk to the fountain.
82
Joe and Susannah appeared to lean into each other as they walked; this intimacy was even more revealing than the snatched excerpt from their conversation. It was obvious what she had stumbled upon. The question was, what, if anything, she should do with this information – and if, indeed, it was any of her business.
She found James sitting on a wrought-iron bench, his back to one of the hedges. The area that surrounded the fountain was sufficiently far from the spot chosen by Joe Bartholomew and the nurse to mean that he wouldn’t have heard anything; even so, the resonance of two clandestine meetings in so close a proximity made Laska more nervous than ever.
Laska sat on the other end of the bench, pointedly some distance from James – as if some third party were watching from the crisscrossed hedges.
She thought momentarily of the dog creature, then turned her mind to other things and forced a smile.
‘Been busy?’ she asked.
‘The usual,’ said James. There was a look in his eyes that Laska thought she recognised; the look of someone who wants to keep conversation simple, so that some secret won’t spill out. ‘I’ve just escaped from a close encounter with Dr Oldfield,’ he added, too casually for Laska’s liking.
‘What did he want?’
‘Just snooping for information,