‘ You did say somewhere with subdued lighting?’ said Susan Givens, sounding as if she couldn’t believe her ears. ‘Not somewhere with good food or nice surroundings?’
‘ I know it sounds odd but you’ll understand later,’ said Steven who had phoned her next morning to make arrangements for the dinner he’d promised her.
‘ I’m beginning to wonder about you,’ said Susan.
‘ Trust me, I’m a doctor,’ said Steven.
‘ So am I, so let’s cancel that one out, shall we?’ replied Susan. ‘There’s a Spanish place down in Dundas Street called, Los Gemelos. Its electricity bills can’t be too large as I remember. I could hardly read the menu last time.’
‘ I’ll call it,’ said Steven. ‘Pick you up at seven thirty?’
‘ Maybe I’ll bring a torch,’ said Susan and gave him her address.
‘ Good Lord,’ said Susan when she saw Steven’s bruising. ‘Now I understand your affection for the dark. What on earth happened?’
‘ I got mugged,’ replied Steven, who wanted to leave it at that and Susan seemed content with his reply until they were in the restaurant sipping Rioja by candlelight and waiting for their starters.
‘ So, were you mugged by chance or for a reason?’ she suddenly asked, her eyes watching his.
‘ It wasn’t unconnected with the case I’m working on,’ Steven confessed.
‘ The rape and murder case?’
Steven nodded.
‘ Why?’
‘ They wanted to warn me off,’ said Steven.
‘ But from what you told me and from the tests I carried out, there was no problem with the conviction you’d been worried about?’ said Susan.
Steven nodded. ‘Maybe I was getting too close to something else,’ he said.
‘ Gosh, I’m glad I wasn’t asking the questions,’ said Susan, unconsciously touching her cheekbones in sympathy. Do you often get beat up?’
‘ Not often.’
They paused while a plate of tapas was laid between them on the table.
‘ Why did you become a doctor?’ asked Susan.
‘ The usual reason,’ replied Steven.
‘ Care and concern for humanity?’ asked Susan with a tongue-in-cheek smile.
‘ My folks wanted me to be one,’ smiled Steven back. ‘There’s nothing like becoming a doctor for making your mum happy.
Susan smiled. ‘I admire your honesty,’ she said. ‘So you really didn’t want to be one?’
Steven shrugged. ‘At that age, if your mother and father want you to do medicine and your school wants you to do medicine and the rewards seem attractive enough, you end up doing it. You do it without really thinking what it’s going to be like to spend the rest of your life dishing out pills for depression, lancing boils and telling people they’ve got six months to live. It takes a special kind of person to do that the way it should be done and they are far fewer on the ground than people imagine. I suppose I’m just not that kind of person. I don’t like people enough.’
‘ So what kind of person are you, Steven Dunbar?’ asked Susan.
‘ It’s easier to say what I’m not,’ smiled Steven. ‘I often look at the recruitment pages and think, God, I’m the exact opposite of that. Maybe I’m just a selfish loner.’
‘ Well, we can’t all be Mother Theresa,’ said Susan, ‘any more than we can all be dynamic, self-starting team players, giving a hundred and ten percent to the Acme brush company or whatever. Some of us have too much imagination and that’s a dangerous thing. It tends to be socially subversive. We ask questions so we’re made to feel guilty.’
‘ A comfort,’ smiled Steven.
‘ Did you ever practice?’
‘ I did my registration year and then I joined the army. I trained in field medicine and generally played boys’ games with what the papers like to call, an elite regiment.’
‘ Games?’ probed Susan.
‘ If you come back, they’re games,’ said Steven. ‘It’s more serious if you don’t.’
Susan gave a little shake of the head. ‘Different world,’ she said. ‘So why did you leave?’
‘ It’s a young man’s thing. I was looking at middle thirties and getting cold feet about having to convince some drug company that I was a dynamic, self-starting, team-playing, company man — in order to earn a living — when I got lucky and landed the medical investigator’s job with Sci-Med.’
‘ Doesn’t look too lucky from where I’m sitting,’ said Susan, eyeing Steven’s bruises.
‘ It has occasional drawbacks,’ conceded Steven. ‘But it’s the kind of job where I can do things my way. They set me a puzzle and I try to make sense of it.’
‘ You must have had to change the way you think,’ said Susan thoughtfully.
Steven looked at her as if impressed. ‘Absolutely right,’ he said. ‘It was the single biggest change I had to make. I had to switch from thinking along logical lines, using acquired knowledge and experience and start thinking laterally, tangentially and in any other direction you care to mention. I had to learn to think the unthinkable, consider the impossible, and discard no detail in case it might become valuable at a later date or when some other fact came to light. How did you know that?’
Susan smiled and said, ‘It’s largely what I had to do when I decided to make research my career. Medicine’s not the only profession with lots of misfits in it. The situation’s much the same in science. Like being a doctor, being a research scientist carries a certain social status with it, so the job attracts its fair share of exam passers, people who have qualifications coming out their ears but don’t have the imagination of a turnip. They can remember facts and think logically but that’s as far as it goes. The ability to think like a researcher is something you can’t teach. You either have it or you don’t. The best you can do as a teacher is to encourage students to try and look at problems from different angles. Like you say, think the unthinkable, consider the impossible. Whether of course, they are capable of doing it is something else again.’
Steven smiled, pleased that they seemed to be on the same wavelength. The waiter arrived with their Canarian-style dish and they paused to make admiring comments about its presentation before Steven asked, ‘So what unthinkable thoughts are you working on at the moment?’
To Steven’s surprise Susan seemed to freeze and look him straight in the eye. She wasn’t smiling so he imagined that he had offended her in some way. ‘I’m sorry…’ he began. ‘I didn’t mean to…’
Susan shook her head as if to indicate he was misinterpreting things. She said, ‘The ghost bands that appeared on the gel, I’ve just thought of a reason.’
Steven put down his knife and fork.
‘ An unthinkable reason,’ said Susan. ‘The semen sample you gave me to analyse contained semen from two men, not one. They were just present in vastly different proportions…’
Steven felt a shiver on the back of his neck and his mouth become dry.
‘ The victim must have had sex earlier with someone else.’ said Susan.
‘ But she was thirteen years old. She’d been babysitting on her own all evening,’ said Steven.
‘ It’s not unknown for thirteen year old girls to have boyfriends,’ said Susan. ‘And she wouldn’t be the first babysitter to invite her boyfriend round to keep her company.’
‘ From all accounts she wasn’t the type,’ said Steven. ‘According to her mother and even her friends, she’d never had a boyfriend and wasn’t particularly interested in boys. If anything, she was a bit behind her contemporaries in that respect. Horses were her passion. She spent all her free time helping out at the local stables.’
‘ I see,’ said Susan.
‘ So what does that leave?’
‘ Like I said, it was probably an unthinkable idea,’ said Susan.
‘ Let’s not throw it out just yet,’ said Steven. ‘Supposing you’re right and these ghost bands are actually the DNA profile of a second man…’
