The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [21]
‘No, no message.’
Gaddis replaced the receiver. He pulled up Google on Charlotte’s computer. Michael Sobel was the name of a new cancer treatment centre at the Mount Vernon. He would go there in the morning. If he could find Somers on shift, he might be able to find out why Charlotte Berg kept taking him out to lunch in the days leading up to her death. That information, at the very least, would take him a step closer to Edward Crane.
Chapter 8
The Mount Vernon Hospital was only half an hour by car from Gaddis’s house in west London, but he took the Tube in order to recreate, largely for sentimental reasons, the journey on the Metropolitan line which Charlotte had taken from Finchley Road to Rickmansworth in the last week of her life.
These were the suburbs of his childhood, red-brick, post-war houses of indistinct character with gardens just large enough to play a game of Swingball or French cricket. Gaddis remembered his racquet-wielding father launching a tennis ball into near-orbit one hot summer afternoon, a yellow dot disappearing towards the sun. The train passed through Harrow, Pinner, Northwood Hills, the indifferent streets and parks of outer London, starved of sunlight. The hospital itself, far from being the gleaming twenty-first-century new-build of Gaddis’s imagination, was a vaguely sinister, neo-Gothic mansion with a gabled roof and views across the Hertfordshire countryside. It looked like the sort of place that a soldier might have gone to recuperate in the aftermath of World War II; he could picture starchy nurses attending to men in wheel-chairs, veterans and their visitors spread out across the spacious lawn like guests at a garden party.
Gaddis had taken a taxi from Rickmansworth station and was deposited at the hospital’s main reception, located in a modern building a few hundred metres east of the mansion. He followed the signs to the Michael Sobel Centre and drifted around the ground floor until a female doctor, no older than most of his students, saw that Gaddis was lost, offered him an accommodating smile and asked if she could ‘help in any way’.
‘I’m looking for one of the nurses here. Calvin.’ He had assumed that the use of Somers’s Christian name might generate an effect of familiarity. ‘Is he around?’
The doctor was wearing a stethoscope around her neck, like a gesture to Central Casting. She took a good long look at his shoes. Gaddis never gave much thought to his appearance and wondered what it was that people thought they could discern from analysing a stranger’s footwear. Today, he was wearing a pair of scuffed desert boots. In the eyes of a pretty twenty-five-year-old doctor, was that a good or a bad thing?
‘Calvin? Sure,’ she said, her face suddenly opening up to him. It was as if he had passed some unspecified test. ‘I’ve seen him around this morning. He has an office on the second floor, just beyond Pathology. Do you know it?’
‘It’s my first time,’ Gaddis replied. He was not a natural liar and there seemed no point in misleading her. The doctor duly gave him directions, all the while touching her stethoscope. Two minutes later, Gaddis was standing at the door of Somers’s office, knocking on chipped paint.
‘Enter.’
The voice was reedy and slightly strangulated. Gaddis put an age and appearance to it before he had even turned the handle. Sure enough, Calvin Somers was mid-forties, slightly built, with the stubborn, defensive features of a man who has spent the bulk of his life wrestling a corrosive insecurity. He was wearing a pale green nurse’s uniform and there was gel in his thinning black hair. Sam Gaddis had good instincts about people and he disliked Calvin Somers on sight.
‘Mr Somers?’
‘Who wants to know?’
It was a smartarse line from a second-rate American cop show. Gaddis almost laughed.
‘I was a friend of Charlotte Berg’s,’ he said. ‘My name is Sam Gaddis. I’m an academic. I wondered if you might have time for a quick chat?’
He had closed the door behind him as he asked the question and Somers looked grateful