The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [20]
At Hampstead station he queued behind a backpacking German tourist and placed the Oyster on a reader at the ticket machine. What he saw intrigued him. The same five journeys, there and back, over a period of fifteen days, from Finchley Road station, which was a fifteen-minute walk from Charlotte’s house, to Rickmansworth, in the suburbs of northwest London. He found a Tube map and traced the simple journey north on the Metropolitan line. It would have taken about forty minutes. For some reason, this small triumph of amateur detection was enough to persuade him not to buy the cigarettes and Gaddis returned to the house with a renewed sense of purpose.
He took the receipts from the envelope a second time, pouring them on to the kitchen table: WH Smith’s, Daunt Books, Transport for London. Some writing caught his eye: scrawled on the back of two receipts which were from the same pub in Chorleywood, Charlotte had written: Lunch C Somers. The dates matched the days on which she had travelled north from Finchley. Gaddis knew that Chorleywood and Rickmansworth were no more than a couple of miles apart. He went back outside and returned to the computer, running a search for the name ‘Somers’. Nothing came up. Just the same black hole of false leads and dead ends which had wiped out his morning.
Perhaps she had made telephone calls to a landline in the Rickmansworth area? Gaddis typed ‘Dialling code for Rickmansworth’ into Google and wrote down the number: 01923. The same prefix was listed for Chorleywood. He then checked the results against an itemized phone bill which he had discovered while drinking a cup of coffee at her desk almost five hours earlier. Sure enough, in the three weeks of her journeys from Finchley, Charlotte had made half a dozen calls to the same 01923 number. Gaddis took his own phone from the pocket of his coat and dialled it.
A woman answered, bored to the point of despair.
‘Mount Vernon Hospital.’
Gaddis said ‘Hello?’ because he was unsure precisely what she had said and wanted it repeated.
‘Yes,’ she said, sounding impatient. ‘Mount Vernon Hospital.’
He scribbled the name down. ‘Please. Yes. I’m looking for a patient of yours. Thomas Neame. Would it be possible to speak to him?’
The line went dead. Gaddis assumed that he was being connected to a separate part of the hospital. If Neame answered, what the hell was he going to say? He hadn’t thought things through. He couldn’t even be sure that the old man would know what had happened to Charlotte. He would have to tell him about her heart attack and then somehow explain his interest in Edward Crane.
‘Sir?’ It was the receptionist again. Her tone was fractionally less hostile. ‘We don’t have a patient of that name here.’
There didn’t seem to be any future in asking to check the spelling of ‘Neame’. Nor could he enquire about Somers. The receptionist might smell a rat. Instead Gaddis thanked her, hung up and called Paul at work.
‘Do you have a relative who works at the Mount Vernon Hospital in Rickmansworth?’
‘Come again?’
‘Rickmansworth. Chorleywood. Hertfordshire suburbs.’
‘Never been there in my life.’
‘What about Charlotte? Could she have had a relative up there or a friend that she was visiting?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
Somers was obviously the key. But was he a patient at the hospital or a member of staff? Gaddis redialled Mount Vernon using the phone in the house and was put through to a different receptionist.
‘Could I speak to Doctor Somers please?’
‘Doctor Somers?’
It was the wrong call. Somers was a patient, a porter, a nurse.
‘Sorry . . .’
‘You mean Calvin?’
The Christian name was a lucky break. ‘Yes.’
‘Calvin’s not a doctor.’
‘Of course not. Did I say that? I wasn’t concentr—’
‘He’s a Senior Nurse in Michael Sobel.’ Gaddis scrawled down Michael Sobel. ‘He’s not due back on shift until the morning. Is there anything