Queen of Swords

Robert Mills

Description

When senior nurse, Jenny Butcher, is strangled in her flat, Detective Inspector Sanjay Patel is part of the team led by Chief Inspector Tracy Taylor that investigates her murder. Patel is a British-born Indian who dropped out of medical school to join the police force. The team start to investigate the background leading up to the murder. After divorcing her husband, Jenny had moved to London to make a fresh start in a new job. Just before her murder, she had broken up with mathematics professor, Leo Roberts. Hospital manager, Keith Richards, was rejected by Jenny and was seen arguing with her. Marcus Buckland, an ENT surgeon, was formerly Jenny's lover and wanted to rekindle their affair. His estranged wife, Dr. Lorraine Fletcher, had good reason to hate the victim. All the suspects appear to have alibis.When one of Richards's former girlfriends is murdered, officers go to arrest him but he has disappeared. Patel is suspended, following a racially motivated complaint by Inspector Colin Brewer, who has become convinced Richards is Guilty. Patel must now find a way to be reinstated and Richards, returning to London, is equally determined to clear his name.

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800469471
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2021 Robert Mills

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.


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ISBN 978 1800469 471

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

“The Queen of Swords reversed may be a liar, a cheater, disloyal or just generally deceitful.”
( www.thetarotguide.com )


Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One


Chapter One
Eventually the hands that had squeezed her neck so savagely let go and she fell to the floor. She lay there, bathed in the thin rays of the late autumn sun that streamed through the large picture window. She wasn’t breathing but there was still some flickering activity in her brain. Consciousness returned but it was incomplete, like the state between waking and sleep when the body lies still while the mind gathers its thoughts. She did not know what had happened to her or where she was, but she knew she was happy. She was happier than she had been for a very long time and the reason for her happiness was love. Gradually consciousness ebbed away again, like sand through the narrow neck of an hourglass. As the last few grains fell, she saw a face, his face, and then she was enveloped by the dense black of eternal night.
*
Sylvia North checked the time. She would need to leave right away or she would be late for the management team meeting. She went over to the mirror on her office wall and checked her appearance. Dissatisfied, she brushed a stray bottle-blonde hair from her forehead and applied a little more lipstick. Much better. She was wearing a powder-blue suit and a white blouse, teamed with flesh-coloured tights and blue high-heeled shoes. The skirt felt tight and, not for the first time, she made a mental note to try to lose some weight.
Picking up a bundle of paper from her desk, she went to the office next door to hers, which belonged to the directorate’s clinical nurse manager, Jenny Butcher, but found it to be empty with no evidence of recent occupation. Jenny should have been at her desk ready to accompany her to the meeting, so this was a surprise. She went out into the front office where the directorate secretary, Rachel Brown, was rattling away at the keyboard of her computer.
“Have you seen Jenny this morning?” she asked.
“No, I don’t think she’s in yet,” said Rachel without looking up from what she was doing.
“That’s odd. Has she got a study day or something?”
The secretary stopped typing, opened another window on her computer and peered at it through her metal-rimmed glasses.
“There’s nothing in the diary,” she said.
Sylvia felt a little annoyed. Normally, Jenny was the one who read all the papers for these meetings and summarised them for her, so she wasn’t as prepared as she might have been. There was no time to read them all now; she’d just have to wing it.
“Oh well, I’ll just have to go without her,” she said. “Tell her to come straight to the meeting when she shows up.”
Sylvia took the lift to the third floor and made her way to the boardroom. It was a starkly functional room and lacked the decaying grandeur of its predecessor in the old hospital. Most of the other members of the management team were already there, chatting amongst themselves or bent over the bundles of paper that each had been sent prior to the meeting. At the far end of the long, polished wooden table, the only remaining relic of the old boardroom, she spotted the lead clinician for otolaryngology, Graham Anderson, and went over to sit beside him.
“You don’t know where Jenny is, do you?” she said. “She hasn’t come in this morning.”
Anderson shook his head.
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “I saw her last Friday morning. She seemed fine then.”
“It’s not like her to be late.”
“No, it isn’t. Do you know if she’s finished the business case for the new nurse-led clinic?”
“No, I don’t. I’ll ask her when I next see her.”
“It’s got to be in by Tuesday or we’ll miss the deadline for the current funding round.”
The nurse-led clinic was Graham Anderson’s pet project. It did tick some boxes with the trust management but Sylvia knew that it was near the bottom of a long list of other projects awaiting approval.
“That’s right,” she said. “I’d forgotten. I’ll check with Rachel when I get back to the office.”
The last to arrive was the chief executive of the trust, a large, balding man who wore horn-rimmed glasses. Sylvia considered him to be an ineffective chairman but he was her boss so she smiled at him as he passed her seat on his way to the head of the table.
He began by asking for updates on the activities of the various hospital directorates. When it was her turn, Mrs North announced that an additional senior doctor had been appointed.
“We’ve been able to recruit an established consultant with an impressive track record,” she said. “As a result, I’m very hopeful we’ll be able to start bringing waiting times down in the not-too-distant future. Of course, he’ll have to give notice to his present employers, but we hope to have him in post roughly three months from now. You’ll no doubt remember that we had agreed that the trust’s waiting times’ targets for ENT can only be met if we have an additional consultant in post; isn’t that right, Graham?”
“Absolutely,” said Anderson. “We’re very pleased about Mr Buckland’s appointment. He and I were registrars together some years ago and I can assure you he’s an excellent colleague and a hard worker.” Realising he had the chief executive’s attention he added: “I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that our operating microscope is rather old and will need to be replaced in the not-too-distant future, especially in view of the fact that Mr Buckland is an expert ear surgeon and would like to develop that aspect of our work. He also pointed out at the interview that the audiology department needs some investment. I’m sure you’re aware that there is a long waiting list for hearing aids at the moment and the facilities for balance tests aren’t exactly state of the art. Mr Buckland would like to establish a clinic for patients with balance problems, which would be a welcome development in my view.”
“I see that the job plan for this post allows for one special-interest clinic,” said the chief executive, peering at a document on the table in front of him. “To answer your question, I can’t see any objection to what you propose, but in the present climate I can’t promise any major capital spending in the immediate future.” He turned to Sylvia North. “I think I’m right in saying that we’ve been aware for some time that audiology needs some investment; is that not so, Mrs North?”
“Yes; we shall be looking at what can be done during the next financial year but, as you know, once again the budget will be tight. We may be able to get some waiting list initiative money if we can make a good enough case to NHS England.”
The chief executive shrugged.
“There would be no harm in putting forward a business case to them,” he said, “but I know there are a lot of calls on that funding stream at the moment.”
The meeting ran its usual tedious course. As usual, the lead clinician for oral and maxillofacial surgery bemoaned the fact that his department was still stuck at the old hospital, while the other departments in the head and neck directorate had moved to the new site when it opened. Predictably, the chief executive responded with standard management phrases such as ‘I hear what you say’, meaning: ‘I note your comments but will ignore them’.
By the time the agenda had been completed it was lunchtime, but when Sylvia North returned to the offices of the