her colleagues in the morgue had taken wagers on whether she’d been struck down with plague or dengue fever.
This seemed to be his day for calling in favors. It took a bit of wheedling and downright arm- twisting, but in the end he ran down her home telephone number, and the vague direction that she lived
“somewhere near Whitchurch.”
Hoping the phone number would be sufficient, he dialed and listened to the repeated double burr. No answer phone kicked in, and he was about to give up when the ringing stopped and her familiar voice came brusquely down the line. “Elsworthy.”
“Babcock,” he replied, just as succinctly, and when there was no response, he sighed and said, “Don’t you dare hang up on me, Doc.”
There was another silence, then she said with resignation, “I take it you’ve seen Gabriel Wain.”
“Oh, yes. And aside from the fact that you’ve made a first-class idiot of me, do you realize you could be struck off for this? Colluding with a suspect in a murder investigation? Keeping vital information from the police?”
“Chief Inspector, you have every right to be angry with me. But I’m a doctor first and a pathologist second, although I suppose it has been a good many years since I’ve been reminded of it.”
“I think you had better start from the beginning,” he said, his patience forced.
“Gabriel didn’t tell you?”
“I want to hear it from you.” And he did, not just to verify Wain’s story, but because he still couldn’t quite believe that the Dr. Elsworthy he had known had strayed so far off course.
“I knew Annie Constantine when she worked for Social Services.
Not well, but I found her competent, and professional, and we got on together. The last case we worked together was a bad one, though—the one where the child was killed by his foster father, do you remember?
“I could tell Constantine was having a difficult time, possibly even suffering some posttraumatic stress, so I wasn’t all that surprised when a few months later I heard she’d taken early retirement.
After that, I didn’t hear from her, or of her, until two days ago, when she showed up at my door as I was leaving for the morgue.
“How she got the address of my cottage, I don’t know—perhaps she had some of the same connections as you, Chief Inspector.” For the first time, he heard a trace of her wry humor.
“She seemed quite distraught,” the doctor continued, “and wouldn’t be brushed off, so in the end I agreed to listen to her. She said she needed help, that one of her former clients was gravely ill but refused to seek any medical treatment. Then she told me what had happened to Rowan Wain and her family.
“Well, I know the doctor who filed the MSBP complaint against Rowan. He’s a self-serving little shit who, when a case is beyond his competence, looks for someone else to blame.”
Babcock, who had never heard the doctor swear before, found himself slightly shocked.
“It wasn’t the first time he’d used a diagnosis of Munchausen by proxy,” she said, an undercurrent of anger in her voice, “and the other parents might have been blameless as well, but they didn’t have Annie Constantine to go to bat for them. They lost their children.
“As Constantine spent time with the Wains, she became convinced that the boy, Joseph, really had suffered from life-threatening seizures, and that the parents had only turned to the medical establishment in desperation.
“It seems she made a crusade of proving their innocence.” Elsworthy paused, and Babcock imagined her frowning, as she did during a postmortem when she didn’t like what she was seeing. “I
suspect she needed a crusade,” she went on, slowly. “The murdered foster child had been in her care, and when the natural parents reported after their visitations that they suspected abuse, she dismissed their claims as no more than a manipulative effort to get their child back. They were drug users, you see, and not terribly dependable.”
Babcock had worked that case, and remembered it all too well.
The natural parents had lashed out at everyone involved in a fury made all the more vicious by the fact that they, too, had failed their child. No wonder Annie Constantine had felt a need for atonement.
“Her determination paid off,” Elsworthy continued. “Eventually, she found corroboration, both from witnesses who had seen the seizures and in hospital records that the doctor reporting the suspected abuse had somehow missed. She got the case dismissed.”
“So how does all this tie in with what happened these last few days?” asked Babcock.
“Chance,” said Elsworthy. “It was pure chance that she motored past the Wains at the Middlewich Junction on Christmas Eve. It’s surprising, I suppose, that she hadn’t run into them before. The waterways are a fairly self- contained world.
“She spoke to them, and although the children seemed well, she thought Rowan looked really ill. The more she thought about it, the more concerned she became. It was when she went back that she and Gabriel had the row, but in the end he agreed to let her see Rowan, who had worsened even in that short time. Annie became convinced that Rowan would let herself die from an untreated illness rather than expose her family to the system again. That’s when she came to me, asking me to examine Rowan, off the record.”
“And was she right? About Rowan’s illness?”
Elsworthy sighed and lowered her voice, as if she didn’t want to be overheard. “Unfortunately, she was more than right. Rowan Wain is suffering from advanced congestive heart failure. She might have been helped, if it had been caught early, but even then she would s
have had to agree to a transplant. Now it’s much too late for that, even were she willing.”
Babcock digested this. “So Rowan Wain really is dying?”
“Yes. All I can do is make her a bit more comfortable. I promised Annie Constantine I would do that, and that I would treat Rowan without calling in the authorities. Then, when Annie was killed, I felt I had to honor my obligation, both to her and to Rowan . . .”
It was, Babcock suspected, as close to an apology for her behavior as he was going to get. “And when you heard Annie Constantine had been murdered, you never thought Gabriel Wain might be involved? ”
“No! Why would Gabriel Wain want to harm Annie? He owed her his family, and more.”
“What if Annie discovered he was connected with the infant we found in the barn?”
“Gabriel?” The doctor’s voice rose in astonishment.
“He did mortar work in the dairy not long before the Smiths sold the place. We’ve narrowed the time frame for the interment to between five and ten years, so it would fi t.”
“I don’t believe it,” Ellsworthy said with utter commitment. “I don’t believe Gabriel Wain could have murdered a child. It’s bound to be coincidence, Chief Inspector, just as it was coincidence that Annie met the family again on Christmas Eve.”
“No, she didn’t mention it. And neither did I,” she added, sounding incensed that he should question her discretion, as if she hadn’t violated a half dozen ethical rules in the last few days.
“One more thing, Doc,” he said lightly, as if it were of no great import. “Do you have the children?”
The silence on the other end of the line was so profound that for
a moment he thought she had severed the connection. Then he heard her draw in a breath. “Yes. Yes, I have the children. I though it best, under the circumstances.” She hesitated again, then said quietly,
“Ronnie, leave them be. And promise me that if you feel you must take Gabriel Wain in for questioning, you’ll let me know. Someone needs to stay with Rowan.”
“If you’ll make me a promise, Doc,” he returned, unable to imagine calling her by her first name. “Tell me the truth from now on.”
He’d just rung off when he heard a tap on his door and Sheila Larkin peered in. “Got a minute, Guv?” When he nodded, she came in and sat demurely in his extra chair. She was dressed rather sensibly again today, in trousers and a warm jumper. A good thing, he supposed, especially as they’d stood around on the freezing towpath for half an eternity, but he found he missed watching her struggle to sit in a short skirt without revealing her knickers. “So has our doc gone completely off the rails, then?” she asked with relish.
